Thursday, November 14, 2019
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the single leading source of anti-vax ads on Facebook
Enlarge / Anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during a public hearing on vaccine related bills in 2015. (credit: Getty | Portland Press Herald)
Just two organizations were responsible for the majority of anti-vaccine advertisements on Facebook before the social media giant restricted such content in March of this year, according to a November 13 study in the journal Vaccine.
Of 145 anti-vaccine Facebook advertisements that ran between May 31, 2017, and February 22, 2019, the World Mercury Project and a group called Stop Mandatory Vaccination together ran 54% of them.
The World Mercury Project, which ran the most ads of any single source, is an organization closely aligned with the anti-vaccine group Children's Health Defense. Both are spearheaded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer turned prolific peddler of dangerous anti-vaccine misinformation. He and his organizations promote conspiracy theories about vaccine safety, including the roundly debunked claim that safe, life-saving immunizations are linked to autism. More recently, Kennedy has become a prominent opponent of laws aimed at increasing vaccination rates among school children.
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Docs show surveillance robots from Knightscope collect data using tools like facial recognition, automatic license plate readers, and wireless device detection (Dave Gershgorn/OneZero)
Docs show surveillance robots from Knightscope collect data using tools like facial recognition, automatic license plate readers, and wireless device detection — OneZero obtained a presentation that reveals how Knightscope uses facial recognition and license plate readers to track individuals
Cybersecurity expert Alex Stamos on what scares him most about the upcoming U.S. presidential election
Alex Stamos rose to fame as the former chief security officer for Yahoo and then Facebook. But today he’s the director of Stanford’s Internet Observatory, where he’s immersed in teaching and research safe tech — and understands better than most the threats that the U.S. is facing, particularly as we sail toward the next U.S. presidential election.
Last night, at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco, he talked with New York Times cybersecurity correspondent Sheera Frenkel about a small number of these massively impactful issues, first by revisiting what happened during the 2016 president election, then catching up the audience on whether the country’s defenses have evolved since. (The short version: they haven’t. If there’s any good news at all, it’s that the federal and state governments are at least aware now there’s an issue, whereas they appeared largely blindsided by it the last time around.)
What worries Stamos most are “direct attacks on our election infrastructure” because there’s been so little to bolster it. In fact, a big theme of the interview was the growing inability of the public sector to protect or Americans its democracy against actors who would do the country harm.
As it relates to election infrastructure specifically, Stamos used a hyperlocal example to underscore what the U.S. is dealing with right now. As he told Frenkel, “I live in San Mateo County. I’ve met the CIO of San Mateo County. Really nice guy. I’m sure he has a staff of very hard-working people. The idea that the CIO of San Mateo County has to stand up and protect himself against the [Russian military intelligence agency known as the] GRU or China’s Ministry of State Security or Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or the Lazarus Group of North Korea . . . that’s frickin’ ridiculous. Like, we don’t ask the San Mateo County Sherriff’s department to get ready to repel an invasion by the People’s Liberation Army, but we ask for the cyber equivalent in the United States.
“So I’m most worried,” he continued. “If America’s adversaries want to screw with us, the direct attacks into elections combined with a disinformation attack could be very effective in driving a huge amount of argument and screwing the election to the point where a huge chunk of the country will believe that it was stolen.”
In fact, in nearly every conceivable way, “responsibilities that were once clearly public sector responsibilities are now private sector responsibilities,” he told Frenkel during a later part of their discussion.
He would know, having seen it first-hand.
“When I was the chief security officer at Facebook,” he told the audience, “I had a child safety team. We probably put more bad guys away than almost any law enforcement agency outside of the FBI or [Homeland Security Investigations unit] in the child safety realm. Like, there’s no local police department in the United States that put away more child predators than the Facebook child safety team. That is a crazy stat.
Facebook also has a counter terrorism team and has become in many ways the country’s first responder, he suggested, telling attendees that “there are several terrorist attacks that you’ve never heard of because they didn’t happen because we caught them. Now, there’s some local law enforcement agency took credit for it, but it was actually our team that found it and turned it over to them with a bow on it.”
Americans might shrug off this continuing shift in who is managing what, but they do it at their peril, suggested Stamos — who managed to keep the crowd laughing, even as he painted a bleak picture. As he noted, the big tech “companies are exercising this power without any kind of democratic oversight.” Consider, he said, that “[Facebook’s] authorization is the terms of service that people click through and never read when they join Facebook or Instagram. That’s a bizarre set of rules to be bound by when you have such incredible power.”
Another huge blind spot, said Stamos, is the apparently inability — as well as the collective lack of determination required — of the public and the increasingly powerful private sector to coordinate their work. Here, he offered another broad example to make it accessible. “Say you had an organized group in the United States that’s running a bunch of Facebook ads, but their money is coming from bitcoin from St. Petersburg,” said Stamos. “That is completely invisible to Facebook. That is perhaps visible to FBI . . .but they don’t have access to that actual content [on FB]. And figuring out a way for these two groups to work with each other without massively violating the privacy of everybody on the platform turns out to be super hard.”
Yet it’s worse than even that sounds, he continued. The reason: there’s no decision-tree in part because the issue has grown so unmanageable that no one wants to own what goes awry. “There’s effectively nobody in charge of this right now, which is one of the scariest things we’re facing as a country. Almost nobody is in defense of cyber, and certainly nobody is in charge of the big picture, [meaning] how do we defend against election [interference] both from a cybersecurity perspective and a disinformation perspective.”
Stamos even referred to “pockets of people in the U.S. government who are effectively hiding from the White House and trying very, very hard” to escape its attention. He referred to “one of the last semi-confirmed people in the Department of Homeland Security” who was “hiding in Los Angeles” when Stamos happened to reach him by text. Stamos said this person jokingly wrote back that he hoped it wasn’t the White House that had discovered his whereabouts.
Of course, all kidding aside, with no one at the helm and “no real cross-agency process, there’s really nobody in charge,” said Stamos.
That means the “tech companies are effectively the coordinating body for this. And that’s actually really screwed up.”
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VoltServer adds a data layer to electricity distribution in a move that could help smart grid rollout
Stephen Eaves, the chief executive of a new startup which promises to overlay data on electricity distribution has spent years developing data management technologies.
Eaves’ first company, the eponymous Eaves Devices focused on energy systems in aerospace and defense — they converted the military’s fleet of B2 bombers to use lithium ion batteries.
The second company he was involved in was developing modular array devices to install in central offices and cell towers and conducted early work on electric vehicle development.
His goal, Eaves says, was to “make electricity inherently safe”.
VoltServer is the latest company from Eaves to pursue that goal. Eaves makes transmission safer by breaking electrical distribution into packets and those packets are sent down transmission lines to ensure that are not faults. If there’s a break in the line, the equipment stops transmitting energy.
“We take either AC or DC electricity into a transmitter and the transmitter breaks the electricity into packets and the receiver takes the packets and puts them back together and distributes it as regular AC/DC current,” Eaves explains.
The architecture is akin to a router. There’s digital signal processing in the transmitter powered by a semiconductor that’s a gateway for the electricity. “It’s like the devices you find in solar power converters,” says Eaves.
Already roughly 700 stadiums, large offices, and indoor grow facilities have deployed the company’s technology. And the traction was enough to attract the attention of Alphabet subsidiary, Sidewalk Labs, which led a recent $7.4 million financing into the company. To date, the company has raised $18 million from a clutch of investors including: Marker Hill Capital, Slater Technology Fund, Natural Resources Capital Management, Clean Energy Venture Group, Angel Street Capital and Coniston Capital.
“We’re kind of a combined hardware and software company,” says Eaves. “[Customers] buy the boxes and the company has third parties that install it.. There are software applications to track energy usage to assign processes for what to do in an outage.”
Typical installations can be anywhere from $30,000 to $1 million and the company is targeting three core markets — intelligent building infrastructure, communications, and indoor agriculture, according to Eaves. In fact, the company’s largest installation is a lettuce farm in Florida. “You’re in a very constrained environment and you want a very safe transmission technology. And we’ve developed a lighting product. It removes a lot of the conversion electronics that would normally be in the growth space,” says Eaves.
The technology certainly slashes the cost for power transmission in a stadium. Traditional power transmission can cost roughly $36 per linear foot, while VoltServer can cut that cost to less than $10 per foot, according to the company.
VoltServer isn’t the only startup that’s looking to add data controls to electricity distribution. Companies like Blueprint Power, Blue Pillar, and monitoring companies like Enertiv and Aquicore are all looking at ways to monitor and manage distribution. At the grid scale, there’s Camus Energy which looks to provide energy “orchestration” services.
“Electricity powers our world, but the fundamental danger inherent in AC or DC electricity makes today’s electrical systems expensive to install or change,” said Sidewalk Labs chairman and chief executive, Dan Doctoroff in a statement. “[This technology] is a breakthrough, offering a less expensive, safer and more efficient way to distribute electricity that can make buildings more affordable and flexible. Over time, that can make cities more affordable, sustainable, and adaptable as our needs change.”
For some investors in the energy sector, these kinds of distribution and transmission technologies are a critical component of the next generation of grid technologies needed to bring the world closer to 100% renewable transmission.
“What is relevant is internet-connected, controllable energy assets that you can control from some centralized dispatch,” says one investor active in energy investing.
Sources: Cantor Fitzgerald agreed to invest as much as $600M in Tether for about a 5% stake in the past year; Cantor holds most of Tether's $134B in assets (Wall Street Journal)
Wall Street Journal : Sources: Cantor Fitzgerald agreed to invest as much as $600M in Tether for about a 5% stake in the past year; Canto...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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