Sunday, August 4, 2019
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Didi Chuxing’s autonomous driving unit is now an independent company
Didi Chuxing’s autonomous driving unit is now an independent company, the Chinese ride-sharing and transportation giant said today. Didi’s autonomous driving team was created in 2016 and now has more than 200 employees in China and the United States. Didi’s announcement comes about a month after The Information reported that Didi was in talks with investors including SoftBank, its largest shareholder, to raise money for the unit.
In its announcement, Didi said the new company “will integrate the resources and technological advantages of Didi’s platform, continue to increase investment in R&D of core innovative technologies, and deepen collaboration with upstream and downstream auto industry partners” and also promote self-driving technology to transportation authorities.
The Financial Times reported last year that Didi had been approved to test self-driving vehicles in California, where it has a research facility in Mountain View. But Didi has to catch up with other companies that have been testing autonomous cars both in the U.S. and China. In California, it was the 53rd company to get a permit to test self-driving vehicles, behind technology rivals like Uber and Waymo.
Didi has already been testing autonomous vehicles, developed in partnership with car manufacturers and suppliers, in China, but its testing lagged far behind Baidu last year, which registered 140,000 kilometers in Beijing, or about 91 percent of the 153,600 miles test-driven by autonomous fleets owned by eight companies, including Didi, Pony.ai, Tencent and automakers NIO, Audi, Daimler AG and BAIC Group.
Aside from being able to license its technology to other transportation and vehicle companies, the launch of robo-taxis may help Didi’s ride-sharing service make up for a shortage in drivers. Stricter screening criteria was put into place after two female passengers were murdered by drivers on Didi’s ride-sharing platform and Didi said last month that it had removed more than 300,000 drivers who didn’t meet its standards since its safety overhaul began last year.
The CEO of the new autonomous driving company will be Zhang Bo, who is also the CTO of Didi. Meng Xing, former executive director of Shunwei China Internet Fund, is its COO, while software engineers Jia Zhaoyin, the head of its technical efforts for Didi’s smart-driving project, and Zheng Jianqiang will head its research and development teams in the U.S. and China.
Redmi K20 Pro, Redmi K20 to Go on Sale in India Today via Mi.com, Flipkart
HP TET 2019 – Teacher Eligibility Test Final Answer Key Released
HP TET Answer Key 2019 – Teacher Eligibility Test Final Answer Key Released
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Cloudflare will stop service to 8chan, which CEO Matthew Prince describes as a “cesspool of hate”
Website infrastructure and security services provider Cloudflare will stop providing service to 8chan, wrote Matthew Prince in a blog post, describing the site as a “cesspool of hate.” Service will be terminated as of midnight Pacific Time.
“The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths,” wrote Prince. “Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.
The decision was made after the suspect in this weekend’s mass shooting at El Paso, who has since been charged with domestic terrorism, posted a lengthy racist and anti-immigration “manifesto” to 8chan almost immediately before the attack, which killed at least 20 people. Federal authorities are treating the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism and the Justice Department is also considering bringing federal hate crime and firearm charges, which both potentially carry the death penalty, against the shooter.
8chan was also used by the perpetrator in March’s terrorist attacks on two Christchurch, New Zealand mosques, as well as the suspect in the April shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California.
“The El Paso shooter specifically referenced the Christchurch incident and appears to have been inspired by the largely unmoderated discussions on 8chan which glorified the previous massacre,” wrote Prince. “In a separate tragedy, the suspected killer in the Poway, California synagogue shooting also posted a hate-filled ‘open letter’ on 8chan. 8chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.”
Before Cloudflare announced its decision to terminate service to 8chan, Prince spoke to reporters from the Guardian and the New York Times, telling the Guardian that he wanted to “kick 8chan off our network,” but also (in the later interview with the New York Times), expressing hesitation because terminating service may make it harder for law enforcement officials to access information on the site.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says that his decision is not about free speech or making money. Instead, he says keeping 8chan within Cloudflare’s network facilitates monitoring of the site and cooperation with law enforcement. https://t.co/PVnnu6LFxM pic.twitter.com/4ffQ8AWLfC
— Julia Carrie Wong (@juliacarriew) August 4, 2019
Update: I talked to Cloudflare CEO @eastdakota, who said he is undecided about whether or not to allow 8chan to continue using its DDOS protection service (which effectively allows the site to stay online) https://t.co/tewgBEqYeF pic.twitter.com/WkU1NYBm6g
— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) August 4, 2019
In his blog post, Prince explained Cloudflare’s ultimate decision to cut service, writing that more than 19 million Internet properties use Cloudflare’s services and the company “[did] not take this decision lightly.”
“We reluctantly tolerate content that we find reprehensible, but we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design. 8chan has crossed that line,” he wrote.” It will therefore no longer be allowed to use our services.”
This is not the first time Cloudflare has cut off service to a site for enabling the spread of racism and violence. Cloudflare previously terminated service to white supremacist site Daily Stormer in August 2017, but noted that the site went back online after switching to a Cloudflare competitor. “Today, the Daily Stormer is still available and still disgusting. They have bragged that they have more readers than ever. They are no longer Cloudflare’s problem, but they remain the Internet’s problem,” Prince wrote.
Prince says he sees the situation with 8chan playing out in a similar way. Since terminating service to the Daily Stormer, Prince says Cloudflare has worked with law enforcement and civil society organizations, resulting in the company “cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network and notifying law enforcement when there was content that contained a legal process to share information when we can hopefully prevent horrific acts of violence.”
But Prince added that the company “continue[s] to feel incredibly uncomfortable about playing the role of content arbiter and do not plan to exercise it often,” adding that this is not “due to some conception of the United States’ First Amendment,” since Cloudflare is a private company (and most of its customers, and more than half of its revenue, are outside the United States).
Instead, Cloudflare “will continue to engage with lawmakers around the world as they set the boundaries of what is acceptable in those countries through due process of law. And we will comply with those boundaries when and where they are set.”
Cloudflare’s decision may increase scrutiny on Amazon, since the 8chan’s operator Jim Watkins sells audiobooks on Amazon.com and Audible, creating what the Daily Beast refers to as “his financial lifeline to the outside world.”
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Cloudflare CEO on why the company terminated DDoS protection service for 8chan: the site was "lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths" (Matthew Prince/The Cloudflare Blog)
Cloudflare CEO on why the company terminated DDoS protection service for 8chan: the site was “lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths” — The mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio are horrific tragedies. In the case of the El Paso shooting …
Russian cryptocurrency payment network A7 expands to Africa, as Moscow builds an alternative payments system amid western sanctions after its Ukraine invasion (Financial Times)
Financial Times : Russian cryptocurrency payment network A7 expands to Africa, as Moscow builds an alternative payments system amid weste...
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Sohee Kim / Bloomberg : South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; ...
