Facebook’s internet-beaming drone completed its second test flight and landed ‘perfectly’ - Recode

For more details, see Aquila's successful second flight: Another step forward in bringing the world closer together (Facebook Code blog)

"The plane flew as high as 3,000 feet, up from the 2,150 feet it did a year ago. Eventually, Facebook hopes Aquila will fly between 60,000 and 90,000 feet in the air for months at a time in order to beam wireless internet down to rural areas of the world where that are currently off the grid.

Why is Facebook doing this? Because it’s impossible to accomplish its mission, which is to connect everyone in the world, without everyone first being on the internet. Facebook announced this week that it now has two billion total users. Getting to three billion will likely require improvements to wireless infrastructure, so Facebook is hoping to speed things along.

But this will still take some time. Facebook first announced the drone almost two years ago and just completed its second test flight at about 5 percent of the minimum elevation it hopes to achieve."

Facebook’s internet-beaming drone completed its second test flight and landed ‘perfectly’ - Recode

Twitter is looking for ways to let users flag fake news, offensive content - The Washington Post

Perhaps Trump's Twitter adventure may be over soon...

"Twitter is exploring adding a feature that would let users flag tweets that contain misleading, false or harmful information, according to two people familiar with the company's projects.

The feature, which is still in a prototype phase and may never be released, is part of the company’s uphill battle against rampant abuse on its platform. It could look like a tiny tab appearing in a drop-down menu alongside tweets, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release details of the effort."

Twitter is looking for ways to let users flag fake news, offensive content - The Washington Post

Fake news: you ain’t seen nothing yet (The Economist)

Likely to mainstream just in time for the 2020 election...

"The video, called “Alternative Face v1.1”, is the work of Mario Klingemann, a German artist. It plays audio from an NBC interview with Ms Conway through the mouth of Ms Hardy’s digital ghost. The video is wobbly and pixelated; a competent visual-effects shop could do much better. But Mr Klingemann did not fiddle with editing software to make it. Instead, he took only a few days to create the clip on a desktop computer using a generative adversarial network (GAN), a type of machine-learning algorithm. His computer spat it out automatically after being force fed old music videos of Ms Hardy. It is a recording of something that never happened. Mr Klingemann’s experiment foreshadows a new battlefield between falsehood and veracity. Faith in written information is under attack in some quarters by the spread of what is loosely known as “fake news”. But images and sound recordings retain for many an inherent trustworthiness. GANs are part of a technological wave that threatens this credibility."

Fake news: you ain’t seen nothing yet

Elon Musk's boring machine completes the first section of an LA tunnel | The Verge

Also see Here's why Elon Musk is waxing philosophical about floors (Business Insider)

"We don’t have details on what Musk hammered out with the city of LA. But he did tweet earlier this month about a meeting with L.A Mayor Eric Garcetti to lay the groundwork for the neccesary permits and regulatory approvals he’d need to start digging with Godot, which weighs about 1,200 tons and runs about 400 feet long. Musk said last month that the first tunnel would run from LAX to Culver City, Santa Monica, Westwood, and Sherman Oaks, with later tunnels covering more of the greater LA area. Now, it looks like the LAX to Culver City route appears underway."

Elon Musk's boring machine completes the first section of an LA tunnel | The Verge

AI Will Add $15.7 Trillion to the Global Economy - Bloomberg

Also see Robocalypse Now? Central Bankers Argue Whether Automation Will Kill Jobs (NYT)

"Gains would be split between $6.6 trillion from increased productivity as businesses automate processes and augment their labor forces with new AI technology, and $9.1 trillion from consumption side-effects as shoppers snap up personalized and higher-quality goods, according to the report.

“The mindset today is man versus machine,” Anand Rao, an AI researcher at PwC in Boston, said at a briefing Tuesday at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions gathering in Dalian, China, where the report was released. “What we see as the future is man and machine together can be better than the human.”

Global GDP, which stood at about $74 trillion in 2015, will be 14 percent higher in 2030 as a result of AI, according to PwC’s projections."

AI Will Add $15.7 Trillion to the Global Economy - Bloomberg

Trump Attacks the 'AmazonWashingtonPost' Over Taxes - Bloomberg

Also see Trump, Amazon and ‘Internet Taxes’: What Did He Mean? (NYT)

"The Trump administration  does have the power to cause trouble for Amazon and Bezos. Trump has said that Amazon has a “huge antitrust” problem, arguing that the company has destroyed department stores and the retail industry. That hasn’t kept the company’s stock from rising 27 percent since election day, and recently topping $1,000. But Amazon’s proposed acquisition of Whole Foods Market, the grocery chain, raises a new antitrust vulnerability for the company. 

Of course, that’s getting pretty far ahead of Wednesday's tweet. The AmazonWashingtonPost wasn’t the only target in the president’s morning Twitter fusillade. He also criticized the New York Times as a “Fake News Joke!” and said “some of the Fake News Media” were wrongly accusing him of being unengaged in the health care debate. The Times ran a front-page story saying that Republican senators were keeping Trump at arms length as it tried to write new health care legislation."

Trump Attacks the 'AmazonWashingtonPost' Over Taxes - Bloomberg

Google News gets a cleaner look, new features to make it 'more accessible' (Search Engine Land)

Also see Redesigning Google News for everyone (Google Keyword blog) for details including "a dedicated Fact Check block"

"It’s difficult to believe that Google News is 15 years old. In that time, it has been through a number of feature changes and minor redesigns. The last major redesign was in 2010, but today it’s getting another one.

The idea is to add feature and content depth but also simplify the layout and navigation. I spoke with Anand Paka, the Google News product manager. He said the redesign intends to connect users with more quality journalism and to make Google News more “accessible” to everyone and less of a power user product."

Google News gets a cleaner look, new features to make it 'more accessible'

Facebook Hits 2 Billion-User Mark, Doubling in Size Since 2012 - The New York Times

Also see Facebook’s First, Second, and Third Billions: How Facebook got here, and how it’ll get there (Beyond Devices)

"The user base is bigger than the population of any single country, and of six of the seven continents. It represents more than a quarter of the world's 7.5 billion people.

Facebook defines a monthly active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through its website or a mobile device, or used its Messenger app, in the past 30 days. It does not include people who use the Instagram or WhatsApp networks but not Facebook."

Facebook Hits 2 Billion-User Mark, Doubling in Size Since 2012 - The New York Times

IBM is telling Congress not to fear the rise of an AI ‘overlord’ - Recode

Based on their recent health care plan, GOP leaders probably won't be interested if IBM isn't planning to leverage Watson to kill jobs and/or people

"The brains behind IBM’s Jeopardy-winning, disease-tracking, weather-mapping Watson supercomputer plan to embark on a lobbying blitz in Washington, D.C., this week, hoping to show federal lawmakers that artificial intelligence isn’t going to kill jobs — or humans.

To hear IBM tell it, much of the recent criticism around machine learning, robotics and other kinds of AI amounts to merely “fear mongering.” The company’s senior vice president for Watson, David Kenny, aims to convey that message to members of Congress beginning with a letter on Tuesday, stressing the “real disaster would be abandoning or inhibiting cognitive technology before its full potential can be realized.”"

IBM is telling Congress not to fear the rise of an AI ‘overlord’ - Recode

Box salespeople are going to start pitching storage on Microsoft Azure - Recode

Also see Box and Microsoft partner for cloud content management with Azure (Microsoft News Center)

"By default, documents stored on Box sit on Box’s own servers and are backed up on AWS, according to Box’s chief strategy officer Jeetu Patel.

Box also offers an option for selecting geographic zones to store data, meaning companies can store information with Box on servers in specific countries, in order, for example, to comply with those country’s laws about data storage.

Data stored abroad is sometimes contained on servers from IBM, said Patel. As part of this agreement, Box will start adding Azure’s international locations to its zoned data program."

Box salespeople are going to start pitching storage on Microsoft Azure - Recode

Ransomware Becomes Go-To Hack as Bitcoin Rallies, NSA Tools Leak - Bloomberg

Also see Ransomware Cyberattack Goes Global (Bloomberg)

"The rise of ransomware has coincided with two other major changes in the cyber black market. The first is the growing amount of leaked attack tools from the U.S. government available online. The second is the growing use of digital currencies, which give hackers an easy and potentially anonymous way to get paid. The malware unleashed Tuesday demands payment of $300 in bitcoin. The reason many ransomware operators ask for relatively small payments is that the amount needs to be low enough that enough people will pay, but high enough that it’s worth the effort to attack. Given the secretive nature of cryptocurrencies and the shadowy world in which cybercriminals operate, it’s virtually impossible to get an accurate read on exactly how much the hackers rake in.

Because there’s a glut of credit card and identity data for sale on the black market, it’s gotten harder for criminals to get paid, said Jeremiah Grossman, chief of security strategy for SentinelOne. But rather than try to sell data to a third party, attackers instead encrypt it -- demanding that the victim pay to get it back."

Ransomware Becomes Go-To Hack as Bitcoin Rallies, NSA Tools Leak - Bloomberg

SpaceX is even landing rockets in augmented reality - The Verge

Check the full post for related links

"Like most other ARKit demos we’ve seen so far, this one is brief, and it’s not trying to solve a problem (like this digital measuring tape, for example). But it further illustrates how Apple’s first attempt at augmented reality could be the kind of dazzling feature that the last few iPhones have been missing. And it’s another piece of evidence that ARKit is going to be pretty accurate even without the help of depth sensors. (Though there are rumors that those might be coming to the next iPhone.) 

More importantly, seeing demos like these pop up just weeks after ARKit was released is a sign that the platform Apple has built is easier and more accessible to developers than what’s available from the competition. Garcia says he’d never even worked with augmented reality before ARKit, but he’s already working with a team to be ready for when iOS 11 opens up this new segment in the app market."

SpaceX is even landing rockets in augmented reality - The Verge

Waymo, Apple Deals Bolster Rental-Car Firms for Ride-Sharing Age - Bloomberg

Interesting automotive times

"Old-school rental-car agencies may have a road map to prosper in the age of self-driving taxis after all.

Avis Budget Group Inc. agreed to manage a fleet of 600 self-driving Chrysler minivans for Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo autonomous technology division. In addition, Hertz Global Holdings Inc. will lease Lexus sport-utility vehicles to Apple Inc., which will convert them to self-driving cars, said people familiar with the matter Monday. 

Those deals, while small in scope, comforted investors enough to push up shares of both companies by 14 percent, a remarkable one-day showing for an industry whose stocks have long been out of favor. The reason for the optimism: Calling on the likes of Avis and Hertz shows that Apple and Waymo are willing to partner with traditional players instead of driving them into oblivion. The big technology companies may want into the self-driving vehicle business, but they don’t necessarily want to build, own or shine the metal."

Waymo, Apple Deals Bolster Rental-Car Firms for Ride-Sharing Age - Bloomberg

How Silicon Valley Pushed Coding Into American Classrooms - The New York Times

From an extensive Code.org profile

"In a few short years, Code.org has raised more than $60 million from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Salesforce, along with individual tech executives and foundations. It has helped to persuade two dozen states to change their education policies and laws, Mr. Partovi said, while creating free introductory coding lessons, called Hour of Code, which more than 100 million students worldwide have tried.

Along the way, Code.org has emerged as a new prototype for Silicon Valley education reform: a social-media-savvy entity that pushes for education policy changes, develops curriculums, offers online coding lessons and trains teachers — touching nearly every facet of the education supply chain."

How Silicon Valley Pushed Coding Into American Classrooms - The New York Times

Google Fined $2.7 Billion in E.U. Antitrust Ruling - The New York Times

Another industry record for Google -- final paragraphs:

"Whatever the outcome, analysts expect a protracted legal battle that will continue for several years as both Google and its rivals fight to define how the search giant can offer its services to Europeans and those farther afield.

“The changes could have ramifications beyond Google Shopping, and might even impact Google’s operations in the U.S.,” a number of American companies that have filed antitrust complaints against Google said in a public letter ahead of the ruling on Tuesday. The signatories included Oracle, News Corporation and Yelp."

Google Fined $2.7 Billion in E.U. Antitrust Ruling - The New York Times

Alexa, What Happens if the Echo Has a Screen? You Get This Review - The New York Times

Final paragraphs

"But the average person would be wise to wait before buying the Echo Show.

The device is the priciest in the Echo family — $50 more than the Echo speaker and $180 more than the Echo Dot, the miniature version of the speaker. And it remains to be seen what third-party companies do with applications designed for an always-on screen that stays put.

Until then, you could always grab a tablet you already own, put it on a stand and leave it plugged in. The results will most likely be the same."

Alexa, What Happens if the Echo Has a Screen? You Get This Review - The New York Times

The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence - The New York Times

From a timely AI reality check

"Unlike the Industrial Revolution and the computer revolution, the A.I. revolution is not taking certain jobs (artisans, personal assistants who use paper and typewriters) and replacing them with other jobs (assembly-line workers, personal assistants conversant with computers). Instead, it is poised to bring about a wide-scale decimation of jobs — mostly lower-paying jobs, but some higher-paying ones, too.

This transformation will result in enormous profits for the companies that develop A.I., as well as for the companies that adopt it. Imagine how much money a company like Uber would make if it used only robot drivers. Imagine the profits if Apple could manufacture its products without human labor. Imagine the gains to a loan company that could issue 30 million loans a year with virtually no human involvement. (As it happens, my venture capital firm has invested in just such a loan company.)

We are thus facing two developments that do not sit easily together: enormous wealth concentrated in relatively few hands and enormous numbers of people out of work. What is to be done?"

The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence - The New York Times

Apple’s AR is closer to reality than Google’s | The Verge

Coming soon to an iOS device near you

"Apple has often been accused of acting like it invented things that others have been doing for years. That complaint is not without merit, however Apple can lay claim to transforming existing things into mainstream successes, which takes no small amount of invention in its own right. Fingerprint authentication and contactless payments are just two recent examples, having both existed in Japan and on niche devices for over a decade before Apple raised them to global prominence with the iPhone.

Next up on Apple's agenda is augmented reality, the act of superimposing digital data and visuals atop a live video feed of your surroundings — something that Google, Microsoft, and many others have been experimenting with for a long time. Apple is far from being able to claim it invented AR, but its new ARKit in iOS 11 is already showing signs to suggest that Apple will help bring AR into the mainstream faster and better than anyone else."

Apple’s AR is closer to reality than Google’s | The Verge

Google will stop scanning content of personal emails | Technology | The Guardian

Less scroogled

"The company did read the emails in personal Gmail accounts in order to target users with personalised adverts but said in a blogpost it would stop doing so in order to “more closely align” its business and consumer products. Its business offering, part of G Suite, has never involved scanning emails.

“G Suite’s Gmail is already not used as input for ads personalisation,” wrote Diane Greene, the senior vice president in charge of Google Cloud. “Google has decided to follow suit later this year in our free consumer Gmail service. Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalisation after this change.”"

Google will stop scanning content of personal emails | Technology | The Guardian

The Man Who Helped Turn Toronto Into a High-Tech Hotbed - The New York Times

From a profile of a pioneer

"Dictate a text on your smartphone, search for a photo on Google or, in the not too distant future, ride in a self-driving car, and you will be using technology based partly on Dr. Hinton’s ideas. 

His impact on artificial intelligence research has been so deep that some people in the field talk about the “six degrees of Geoffrey Hinton” the way college students once referred to Kevin Bacon’s uncanny connections to so many Hollywood movies.

Dr. Hinton’s students and associates are now leading lights of artificial intelligence research at Apple, Facebook, Google and Uber, and run artificial intelligence programs at the University of Montreal and OpenAI, a nonprofit research company."

The Man Who Helped Turn Toronto Into a High-Tech Hotbed - The New York Times: