Ford bets $1 billion on an unknown self-driving AI company

Seemingly out of the blue, Ford announced today that it’s investing $1 billion in Argo AI, a Pittsburgh-based company building self-driving technology. Ford is effectively buying the previously unknown startup, which was founded by engineers from Google and Uber. Argo AI will operate as an independent subsidiary and will focus on developing a software platform for Ford’s self-driving car, which the company is targeting for 2021. Notably, Ford is also planning to license the technology out to other companies.

While the extent of the deal is surprising, it makes sense for Ford, especially after GM acquired the self-driving car startup Cruise for over $1 billion last year. As we’ve seen with the steady progress from Google’s Waymo, autonomous driving technology is evolving quickly. Car companies have to make some big moves now if they don’t want to get left behind once the technology becomes essential in a few years.

Ford will combine the team building its virtual driver system, which serves as the “brains” of the self-driving cars, together with Argo AI. Both companies will benefit from the new arrangement: Ford doesn’t have time to waste building its own AI platform from scratch, and Argo will need help getting its technology to consumers once it’s ready.

Source: Ford

Inauguration-protest arrests lead to Facebook data prosecution

If you attend a protest in Washington, D.C., nowadays, better plan on leaving your cellphone at home. That is, unless you want police to confiscate it, mine it for incriminating information and then gather even more data from their BFF — Facebook.

At least one person arrested during protests on inauguration day got an email from Facebook’s Law Enforcement Response Team alerting them that investigators wanted access to their data. Another received a Facebook data subpoena.

The email was basically a countdown to when Facebook inevitably handed that data over to DC police. That is, unless the respondent figured out how to file an objection within a ten-day window.

When over 230 people were arrested in DC during protests against Donald Trump last month, many of those rounded up were not part of the protests. Cops swept up Medics, legal observers, and six journalists from Voactiv, RT America and others.

All of their phones were confiscated and retained.

Everyone arrested now faces felony charges and up to 10 years in prison. In the Bay Area, where we love a good protest, it’s very rare that arrested protesters get prosecuted. So it’s odd to think that protesters would have their social media scrutinized after an arrest. Though, like in most cities across America, it’s extremely common for investigators to search the social media of suspects in other crimes if they believe that the suspect posted something related (like photos of a beating). SFPD even has an officer devoted to following social media — most heavily, Snapchat and Instagram, as those are apparently where you find the best crime stuff.

Oakland Police and supporting agencies like California Highway Patrol have been very transparent about monitoring Twitter to determine protest movement and plans. And we’ve been pretty vocal about pushing back. It only makes sense that we’d resist any form of surveillance, seeing that we’re ground zero around here for ethically challenged startups that invade our privacy. Fighting the surveillance state has become part of our DNA. But a wide-ranging Facebook subpoena for felony protest prosecution isn’t something we’ve seen the likes of.

The second subpoena issued to Facebook (this one by the U.S. Attorney’s Office on January 27, 2017 and signed off on by a DC Metropolitan Police Detective) obtained by press this week is chilling. It targeted another inauguration arrestee, and requests subscriber information from Facebook that includes all names, all addresses (home, business, emails), phone records, session details (IP, ports, etc), device identification info, payment information, and more.

CityLab explained, “The redacted blocks on the second page shield columns of phone numbers, which are connected to other arrestees for whom the District Attorney and police are seeking information.”

The list of phone numbers may indicate that police have gained access to someone’s phone and are building a case with what they found. A screenshot provided to CityLab indicates police began mining information from the confiscated devices right after the arrests.

On one hand, that could’ve been automated pinging by Gmail to Google’s servers. Or, it could’ve been something darker. When phones are taken as evidence, they’re are supposed to be secured in a signal-blocking Faraday bag to prevent remote wipes. Fred Jennings, a cybercrime defense attorney at the firm Tor Ekeland, P.C. in New York, told press. “If it had been secured properly and placed in the bag to safeguard it, there’d be no way for it to ping the server.”

For some of us, this sets off a different set of alarms. It’s scary enough that police are arresting journalists and mining our phones for all the terrifyingly detailed data Facebook seems all too happy to give up. But authorities with questionable intent are also collecting our contacts, and pose a very real risk for our protected sources.

Some of this could be solved by ditching our devices in favor of carrying on-the-scene burner phones. But this presents a new host of complications and problems, even for the good-intentioned protester or march participant. For one, it’s a hassle for most people. It also defeats the purpose of using your Twitter or Facebook account. More than ever, it’s vital that our voices are heard through media we share from our phones. Things like immigration ban protests and the state-level denial of chaos at the airports can’t be dismissed when the realities are documented through our established Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Keeping a record of what authorities do to us, and being able to send a signal flare for help to our networks, makes them being used against us a much bigger problem than just saying “leave your phone at home” or “don’t talk about the protest online.”

It’s not a stretch to lay blame at Facebook’s feet for taking data we don’t necessarily want to give them, and for its well-established collaboration with police against its users. It’s a bigger stretch to suggest that the agreement between Facebook and its users is any kind of informed consent.

It’s interesting that this news comes up the same week that 333,000 people signed a petition demanding Facebook improve its corporate citizenship, with 1,500 of the signees being company shareholders. That document led to a proposal to remove Mark Zuckerberg from the board.

This, it said, was necessary at a time when Facebook “faces increasing criticism regarding its perceived role in the promotion of misleading news; censorship, hate speech and alleged inconsistencies in the application of Facebook’s community standards guidelines and content policies; targeting of ad views based on race; collaboration with law enforcement and other government agencies; and calls for public accountability regarding the human rights impacts of Facebook’s practices.”

It’s that collaboration with law enforcement and human rights accountability we’ll be hearing more about as the DC arrest cases unfold. It’s not a new story, just an old one with a twist: Facebook got called out just before the US presidential election for colluding with authorities against its users’ human rights, specifically US police departments. A coalition of 70 human rights groups including the ACLU wrote a public letter to Facebook condemning the company’s zeal in doing police bidding around the world.

Facebook, of course, just wants us to live our lives so it can keep collecting data we don’t even know we’re creating. Recording and storing our location, connections, contacts, experiences, our secrets and our history.

It’s transforming our memories into a malevolent, atavistic shadow that someday may be used against us in a court of law.

Images: REUTERS/Andrew Kelly (Immigration lawyers JFK), REUTERS/Robert Galbraith (Mark Zuckerberg)

Astronaut filmed elusive blue lightning aboard the ISS

Some types of electrical discharge phenomena like blue jets and red sprites occur way above the altitudes where normal lightning occurs. That makes it tough to see them or even to confirm that they actually take place. There’s a group of people living in just the right place to witness them happen, though: astronauts aboard the International Space Station. ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen filmed thunderstorms from the ISS in September 2015 using the most sensitive camera in the orbiting lab. Now, Denmark’s National Space Institute has finally confirmed that Mogensen indeed caught 245 blue flashes on cam — you’ve really got to watch the video after the break.

Apparently, satellites tried to capture upper-atmosphere lightning in the past, but their viewing angles aren’t ideal for filming them. ESA says Mogensen’s successful attempt proves the ISS is “a suitable base for observing these phenomena.” Back in 2012, the ISS crew also successfully captured an image of a red sprite by accident. Now that researchers know how to best observe these little-understood phenomena, they’ll be able to study them further and help us better understand how the atmosphere protects us from radiation.

Source: ESA

Apple’s Jennifer Bailey Says Customers Are Willing to Switch Banks to Use Apple Pay

Apple Pay vice president Jennifer Bailey believes that Apple Pay is valuable enough that “customers will say they are happy to switch banks to use it.”

Bailey claims Australians are using Apple Pay more frequently than customers in any other countries, which she said “is in large part due to Australia being a recognized global leader in contactless payments and usage.”

That’s good news for ING Direct and Macquarie, which have announced they will enable support for Apple Pay in Australia by the end of February. Both banks are listed as “coming soon” on the Apple Pay website in Australia, alongside ANZ, Bank Australia, Beyond Bank, P&N Bank, and over 30 other smaller banks.

Bailey’s comments, made in an interview with the Australian Financial Review, appear to be directed towards three of Australia’s “Big Four” banks that refuse to accept Apple Pay, namely Commonwealth Bank, NAB, and Westpac. The fourth bank, ANZ, has supported Apple Pay since April 2016.

The trio of banks, along with Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, instead turned to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in an attempt to gain access to the NFC hardware in the iPhone. The banks want access to the NFC chip so they can offer their own existing bank-run mobile payments services.

“While initially, in many markets, there have been banks that have initially been wary about working with a company as large as Apple, once they begin to work with us and understand the Apple Pay platform, they see the benefits of it,” said Bailey. “That hasn’t fully happened with the ACCC applicants, because the conversation is happening through the ACCC process, compared to what normally happens, which is we have the conversation bilaterally.”

The ACCC denied rejected the application from the banks in November as part of a draft ruling, and its final decision will be announced in March.

Last year, Apple told the ACCC that “allowing the banks to form a cartel to collectively dictate terms to new business models and services would set a troubling precedent and delay the introduction of new, potentially disruptive technologies.”

Apple upholds very high security standards for our customers when they use Apple devices to make payments. Providing simple access to the NFC antenna by banking applications would fundamentally diminish the high level of security Apple aims to have on our devices.

Unfortunately, and based on their limited understanding of the offering, the [banks] perceive Apple Pay as a competitive threat. These banks want to maintain complete control over their customers. The present application is only the latest tactic employed by these competing banks to blunt Apple’s entry into the Australian market.

Earlier this week, the banks said they are fighting to provide “real choice” and “real competition” for consumers.

The application has never been about preventing Apple Pay from coming to Australia or reducing competition between wallets. It has always been about providing real choice and real competition for consumers and facilitating innovation and investment in the digital wallet functionality available to Australians. Apple’s statement that the application is fundamentally about an objection to the fees that Apple wish to be given rather than NFC access, is incorrect and unsupported.

Despite the ACCC negotiations and apparent ill-will, Bailey said Apple still wants “to work with the banks in Australia to bring Apple Pay to our customers, in a way that advantages many of the things they are offering through their banking apps, which we have done already in other markets.”

“That’s why the announcement about these new banks is important and we are continually on that path – because as more banks get on the platform, I think there is more of an industry understanding about how Apple Pay really compliments their services,” she added, referring to ING Direct and Macquarie.

Commonwealth Bank, NAB, Westpac, and Bendigo and Adelaide Bank reportedly serve two-thirds of Australian cardholders.

Related Roundup: Apple Pay
Tag: Australia
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Tim Cook Thinks Augmented Reality is ‘Huge Idea’ Like Smartphones

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been on a whirlwind of a trip in Europe this week, making stops in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom to meet with everyone from students and developers to Apple retail employees and government officials.

On Thursday, Cook visited the Ustwo Games offices in London to meet the creators of popular iPhone game Monument Valley. There, he later sat down for a chat with The Independent’s David Phelan to discuss a wide variety of topics, ranging from Apple’s hardware roadmap to augmented reality.

Responding to a question about how difficult it is to stay ahead of the curve, and to put the right hardware in place for the next generation of developers, Cook said Apple will “continue to push” not only on the hardware side, but also on the software side with its Swift programming language.

We try to continually push ourselves to do more and more, not just on the hardware side but also in terms of developers’ tools so they can take advantage of the hardware that’s there, in the best way. That’s the heart of what the coding software Swift is about. We’ve created the language and our hope was that you can get a lot more people coding, and then secondly have people push more to take advantage of the latest hardware.

Cook said the importance of Apple being able to design its own hardware is “rising exponentially” due to things like machine learning and the company’s desire to “maintain a level of privacy” for its users.

In terms of augmented reality, Cook reiterated that he is “excited” about the technology because it “allows individuals to be present in the world but hopefully allows an improvement on what’s happening presently.” But he added there are “things to discover” before the technology is “good enough” for the masses.

I regard it as a big idea like the smartphone. The smartphone is for everyone, we don’t have to think the iPhone is about a certain demographic, or country or vertical market: it’s for everyone. I think AR is that big, it’s huge. I get excited because of the things that could be done that could improve a lot of lives. And be entertaining. I view AR like I view the silicon here in my iPhone, it’s not a product per se, it’s a core technology. But there are things to discover before that technology is good enough for the mainstream. I do think there can be a lot of things that really help people out in daily life, real-life things, that’s why I get so excited about it.

Cook said the developers, among others, he met on his trip were “incredibly uplifting,” particularly with Brexit looming in the United Kingdom.

You can really see the start-up community gaining momentum. That’s important any time but with Brexit hanging over – from some people’s point of view – it’s even more important that these stories get out where people have something to look at and say “You know, times are not really awful, there’s some great things happening.” It gives me a lot of energy to talk to developers, or meet students in classrooms who are using our technology to help learn faster and better. Watching them pursue their passion.

Earlier today, Cook visited the BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology to check out students’ digital design work. He also visited the Woodberry Down primary school and met with London mayor Sadiq Khan to discuss access to talent, digital skills, and Apple’s investment in the city.

Full Interview: Apple CEO Tim Cook: As Brexit Hangs Over UK… at The Independent

Related Roundup: Apple VR Project
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