Airbnb cuts half of San Francisco listings as new laws kick in

San Francisco’s strict short-term home rental laws just kicked in on Wednesday, and are already having a big effect on SF-based Airbnb. Listing plunged from over 10,000 to around 5,500, dropping around 4,760 listings, the site told the San Francisco Chronicle. Wednesday midnight was the deadline for hosts to register homes with the city for a $250 fee, or face fines as high as $1,000 a day.

In 2014, the city passed laws limiting home rentals by absent tenants to 90 days per year, though owners can rent them year-round if they live there. However, San Francisco decided to crack down further in 2015, forcing all Airbnb hosts to register with the city via an onerous process. That prompted nearly a $1 million in fines and a lawsuit from Airbnb, but both parties eventually settled on a system whereby Airbnb could register hosts itself.

We just wanted to have commonsense regulations whereby San Francisco’s acute housing crisis isn’t exacerbated. The board is unanimous in its desire to have real home-sharing that does not take units off the market that would otherwise go to people who live and work here.

Of the rentals left on the market, 2,650 are for commercial B&Bs, hotels or long-term (30 days or longer) listings. That leaves around 3,000 typical Airbnb listings, compared to, say, 65,000 in Paris. The latter city recently enacted its own rules requiring registration and limiting rentals to 120 days a year, but only 11,000 hosts were signed up a month ago.

Airbnb is beloved by tourists and travelers, but hotels consider them as unlicensed competition and city councils and housing advocates say that they take thousands of rentals off the market and distort market prices. “We just wanted to have commonsense regulations whereby San Francisco’s acute housing crisis isn’t exacerbated,” county supervisor Aaron Peskin told the SF Chronicle. “The board is unanimous in its desire to have real home-sharing that does not take units off the market that would otherwise go to people who live and work here.”

Airbnb, for its part seems satisfied that it now has ground rules to follow, at least. “We look forward to building our business in San Francisco with a strong foundation of dedicated hosts, clear rules and a streamlined registration process that supports compliance,” said spokesperson Mattie Zazueta in a statement.

Via: CNET

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

Microsoft adds real-time collaboration to Office 2016 for Mac

Microsoft’s latest update for Office 2016 on Mac adds features that make it a much better tool for collaborative projects. (Or worse, depending on how you prefer attacking group work.) It gives you the ability to work with others in real time à la Google suite — the apps will even show your who’s currently editing via thumbnails in the upper right corner of the window.

On Word and PowerPoint, a little flag icon shows you where other people’s cursors are, and you’d be able to see their changes as they make it. In case you walk away for a bit, PowerPoint will highlight slides that have been changed, so you can check them when you get back and make sure nobody has ruined somebody else’s hard work. To make sure everyone’s edits are incorporated into the file, the apps now auto-saves changes. But you can thankfully roll back to an earlier version by accessing history in case somebody makes a huge blunder. In addition, you can now easily access the files you’re frequently working on through the Open menu.

The update also comes with new charts and functions for Excel, as well as QuickStarter, which auto-creates an outline for your topic, for PowerPoint. You’ll now also be able to manage Google Calendar and Contacts from within Outlook. All these are now available for download when you go to Check for Updates under Help. If you’re using a work or a school computer, however, when you’ll get them depends on when the admin deploys update packages for the apps.

Source: Microsoft Office

Apple’s ‘Everyone Can Code’ Initiative Adopted in 70 Education Institutions Around Europe

Apple today announced that 70 colleges and universities across Europe have adopted its “Everyone Can Code” initiative, which aims to help people learn to create mobile apps for the App Store.

Education institutions in the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Luxembourg, Poland, and Portugal are now offering Apple’s App Development with Swift curriculum, which is a full-year coding course designed by Apple educators and engineers.

“Coding is an essential skill for today’s workforce, and through Everyone Can Code, we’re giving people around the world the power to learn, write and teach coding,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Since launching Everyone Can Code two years ago, we’ve seen growing excitement for the initiative from schools around the world, who are increasingly incorporating the curriculum into their classrooms.”

Institutions highlighted in Apple’s press release include: the Technical University of Munich in Germany, which uses Swift and ARKit to teach business skills that are relevant to the local workplace; the publicly funded Mercantec Vocational College in Denmark, which will offer the course to its 3,000 students; and the Hogeschool van Arnhem en Nijmegen in the Netherlands, where 34,000 students will be offered the chance to learn to code. The U.K.’s Harlow College will also offer the course to its 3,000 students, some of which are adults seeking to regain employment.

“At Harlow College, we recognize that learning to code will help students prepare for a technological future. It develops their approach to problem solving, logic and reasoning, as well as reinforcing key mathematical skills,” said Karen Spencer, Principal of Harlow College. “Everyone Can Code demonstrates how any student can code by providing a unique and innovative environment for learning.”

Apple introduced its App Development with Swift curriculum in early 2017, with the materials available as a free download from the iBooks Store. At the time the initiative was introduced, six community college systems serving 500,000 students across the United States agreed to offer the Apple-designed course. Later in the year, the course expanded to 30 more community college systems in the U.S. before becoming available internationally.

Tags: App Store, Swift, App Development with Swift
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GoPro’s Fusion camera is ready to work with a few Android phones

GoPro’s ability to nail the experience with its 360-degree Fusion camera will rely on its marriage of hardware and software capabilities, and now the latter is getting a boost. An update to the company’s Android app allows certain phones (listed below) to pair with the camera and share 360-degree stills or video clips.

There are only about ten models on the compatible list, and just like on iOS, capabilities vary by platform, however, GoPro expects the list to expand as “we continue to improve stability, image processing and overall performance on the platform.” Until then, Pixel and recent Galaxy owners are among those with one more reason to consider the $700 camera, even if some other Android users don’t.

Compatible Android Devices

• Asus ZenFone AR
• Google Pixel / Pixel XL
• Google Pixel 2 / Pixel 2 XL
• LG V30
• Motorola Moto Z / Moto Z Force
• Motorola Moto Z2 Force
• Samsung Galaxy Note8**
• Samsung Galaxy S7 / S7 Edge*
• Samsung Galaxy S8 / S8+**
• ZTE Axon 7

Source: Google Play, GoPro

Intel’s new cameras add human-like 3D vision to any machine

Intel has released two ready-to-use RealSense depth cameras, the D415 and the D435, that can add 3D capabilities to any device or machine. They both come in a USB-powered form factor and are capable of processing depth in real time, thanks to the chipmaker’s new RealSense vision processor D4. The models work indoors and outdoors in any lighting environment, so they can be used for almost any machine that needs a depth camera. Those include drones meant to soar the skies and robots with AR/VR features.

Intel says the cameras’ target audiences aren’t just developers and manufacturers, but also makers and educators, since they’re easy to use and will work as soon as you plug them in. Also, it comes with Intel’s RealSense SDK 2.0, which is now a cross-platform, open source SDK.

Intel RealSense VP Sagi Ben Moshe said in a statement:

“Many of today’s machines and devices use 2D image recognition-based computer vision, but with Intel RealSense’s best-in-class depth technology, we are redefining future technologies to ‘see’ like a human, so devices and machines can truly enrich people’s lives. With its compact, ready-to-use form, the Intel RealSense D400 Depth Camera series not only makes it easy for developers to build 3D depth sensing into any design, but they are also ready to be embedded into high-volume products.”

The D415 and the D435 are now available for pre-order for $149 and $145, respectively. D415 has a narrow field of view and a rolling shutter that scans its environment from one side to the other to take an image. It works best when dealing with small objects and anything that needs precise measurements. D435, on the other hand, has a wider field of view and has a global shutter that takes images all at once. That makes it ideal for capturing depth perception of objects in motion and for covering big areas, since it minimizes blind spots.

Source: Intel

Second ‘Tomb Raider’ trailer adds welcome backstory to all the action

Our first look at the upcoming Tomb Raider reboot was tonally all over the place, mixing the earlier Angelina Jolie films’ goofy action with the more serious emotional heft of the critically-acclaimed newer Tomb Raider video games. Thankfully, the second trailer leans far more of the former, giving us some propelling motivation and backstory that raises the stakes (an evil organization is planning some evil! The unhinged villain has a grudge against her family!) so we can, y’know, care about the film.

If you played the 2013 Tomb Raider game (itself a reboot of the series) and follow-up Rise of the Tomb Raider, you’ll recognize their influence in the new trailer. Not just the extensive bow-and-arrow action, either: While Angelina Jolie played Lara Croft as a Jane Bond-meets-Indiana Jones globetrotting adventurer, Alicia Vikander embodies a much greener but determined heroine. Also a very durable one, as she endures nature’s beatdown and emerges a bold yet grimy survivor, which mirrors the new games’ overarching theme. (Destiny’s Child’s Survivor playing in the background is far from subtle.)

Tomb Raider is directed by Norwegian Roar Uthaug and written by Geneva Robertson-Dworet, and also stars Daniel Wu (Into the Badlands), Walton Goggins (The Hateful Eight, Django Unchained) and Dominic West (The Wire, 300). The film arrives in theaters on March 16th.

Via: Polygon

Source: Tomb Raider Trailer #2 (YouTube)

Engineers just built the world’s tallest ice tower in China — here’s how

In September 2017, we wrote about a group of Dutch student engineers with the crazy, improbable dream of traveling to China to build a record-breaking, 100-foot high tower made of ice. Oh, and it was going to less than 10 inches thick, too. It sounded awesome, if incredibly ambitious, and we wished them the best of luck on their quest. Jump forward less than six months, and the team has not only completed its objective — it has done so with flying colors.

A collaboration between students and professors in China and the Netherlands, the so-called Flamenco Ice Tower was recently created in the Chinese city of Harbin, home to a famous international ice and snow sculpture festival. The team refers to its creation as the “world’s largest ice shell,” although it’s not created from the kind of pure ice you will find lining your freezer.

“For years we have been doing research at the University of Technology Eindhoven in fiber-reinforced ice,” Yaron Moonen, a graduate student from the University of Technology Eindhoven’s department of structural design and construction technology, told Digital Trends. “By adding cellulose fibers, we can make a building material that is up to three times stronger and way more ductile than normal ice. Together with our building method we can create enormous ice shells and shapes with this material. We use inflatable molds which [are] sprayed layer by layer with fiber reinforced ice. When the shell is thick enough, the inflatable is removed revealing a stand-alone ice structure.”

That’s the process that was followed for creating the team’s ice tower in China. The advantages it has over other building materials include the facts that it is cheap, speedy, and uses only sustainable building materials that can be locally produced — since they are just water and fibers.

“Working in these conditions is hard and challenging,” Moonen said, describing the biggest challenge of the build. “For instance, it is very important that the flow of material in the hoses never stops. At [the freezing temperatures we were working at], it only takes half a minute for a whole length of hose to freeze if the mass stops moving. The delay after such a fault can add up to a long time. So it is very important that the process never stops and keeps on going, 24/7.”

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How ‘speed breeding’ will supercharge farming to save us from starvation

They say speed kills, but when it comes to growing enough food for our future, speed could spell the difference between feast and famine. Luckily, there’s a group of scientists with their proverbial foot on the pedal.

These scientists recently published a paper detailing a new plant breeding technique that may revolutionize the way we grow crops and accelerate the rate at which we can develop hardier, healthier, and more versatile plants in the face of climate change. As climates change, so too does a plant’s productivity in a given region. The key to our well-fed future may be a variety of resilient crops that can grow in diverse environmental conditions.

“A lot of scientists said this was impossible. It was such a radical idea that they told us we couldn’t do it.”

“The rate of gain in most crop breeding programs is lagging behind the demands posed by a growing population,” Brande Wulff, a crops geneticist at the John Innes Center in the United Kingdom and an author of the paper, tells Digital Trends. “By accelerating crop growth and reproduction, scientists and breeders around the world will be able to more quickly breed and engineer plants which are more nutritious, resist disease, and which are better adapted to tomorrow’s climate.”

Appropriately named “speed breeding,” the method has already been shown to grow wheat — from seed-to-seed — in just eight weeks. That’s three times faster than the breeding technique that sparked the Green Revolution. Though still in its adolescence, the speed-breeding results have some analysts pointing to it as a pivotal tool in the coming of a new agricultural era.

Outer Space Origins

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the speed breeding concept originated at NASA. While brainstorming ways to grow wheat in outer space, agency scientists had this crazy idea — why not drape the plants in constant light, empowering them to mature more quickly? Plants, after all, love light. They crave it, crunching photons together with carbon dioxide and water to create the sugars they need to grow. Continuous light might mean continuous growth. Simple, right?

Dr. Brande Wulff (left) and Dr. Lee Hickey look at speed bred wheat crops. Photo: Hickey Lab/University of Queensland

“A lot of scientists said this was impossible,” Lee Hickey, a crop scientist at the University of Queensland and one of the first to adopt NASA’s plan a decade ago, tells Digital Trends. “It was such a radical idea that they told us we couldn’t do it.”

But Lee and his team were unfazed by the nay-sayers. True to the scientific method, they “gave it a go,” designing experiments to test whether intensive light regimes would boost the plants’ productivity.

It didn’t. When the scientists first grew wheat in a speed breeding system, “they looked terrible,” Hickey says, “really runty.” But through a series of experiments that optimized things like nutrition, water supply, light frequency, and greenhouse temperature, the grasses started to mature more quickly and fitly, even showing more grain productivity than conventionally grown greenhouse wheat.

Lee, Wright, and their colleagues, including researchers from the University of Sydney, settled on a light regime that would make even the most devout Sun worshipers balk. “Long day” crops like wheat, barley, and chickpea (which flower in response to longer day cycles) are exposed to as much as 22 hours of continuous light per day, beamed down from LED lamps hung above the grow beds.

The Need for Speed

Under the speed breeding protocol, plants like wheat can go from seed-to-seed in just eight weeks, meaning breeders can grow up to six generations every year.

“The real innovation that they show here is being able to turn generations very quickly. That’s a key aspect of plant breeding.”

“The real innovation that they show here is being able to turn generations very quickly,” Charles Brummer, a UC Davis crop scientist and past president of the Crops Science Society of America, who was not involved in the study, says. “That’s a key aspect of plant breeding.”

With each new generation, researchers attempt to breed in desirable traits while breeding out undesirable ones. The quicker they can take a generation from seed-to-seed, the quicker they can remove undesired traits while promoting wanted ones.

Take, for example, pre-harvest sprouting (PHS), a phenomenon that causes wheat to prematurely germinate due to prolonged rainfall and high humidity.

“This a huge issue in Australia because all our varieties are susceptible,” Hickey says.

Susceptibility to PHS is at least partially controlled by genetics so, by selectively breeding and crossing different wheat varieties, researchers aim to eliminate that genetic trait, making future wheat generations more resilient to high rainfall and humidity. The company Dow AgroSciences has already adopted the speed-breeding technique and developed a variety of wheat with resistance to PHS.

It’s this simple: Increase a crop’s seed-to-seed speed and you make it easier for breeders to develop desirable crops. Boost it by threefold and you give them an exceptional tool to create elite crops.

“Many disease resistance genes can be found in wild relatives of our domesticated crop plants,” Wulff says, “but crossing a disease resistance gene from a wild wheat into a domesticated elite cultivar is like breeding a racehorse with a donkey! It takes many, many years…to combine the best of both worlds. Speed breeding can accelerate this process and shorten the time required to develop a new wheat cultivar with superior traits.”

Brummer puts it bluntly. “Moving faster is the name of the game,” he says. “This is one way to move a lot faster.”

Fields of Dreams

Most of the wheat that makes it into our pasta and bread isn’t grown in greenhouses, however, and there’s a lot that follows the initial breeding stages.

“The real impact will come from combining this tool with other technologies we have that are rapidly evolving in the plant breeding space.”

“At some level, regardless of the genomic tools you use, you need to put plants into the field and see how they perform,” Brummer explains.

It’s in the field that the greenhouse experiments are put to the test. A crop variety may perform well in an artificial environment, where temperature, water supply, and light regimes are easily regulated, but if it doesn’t thrive out in the field, where the vast majority of our crops are grown, then it’s practically a dud. New wheat varieties must be productive out in the elements for farmers to take them on.

“Field testing is so critical,” Hickey says. “We have to have that and make sure the varieties we’re releasing to farmers are proven and have a proven track record. They still have to go through those three or four years of field evaluation.”

Still, even calculating in the few years of field testing, Hickey estimates that speed breeding can squeeze in four or five breeding cycles before 2050, when the population is expected to exceed nine billion and climate change will be tangible worldwide. The hope is that, in the next few decades, breeders can develop varieties resilient enough to withstand what the environment throws at them.

Hickey Lab/University of Queensland

“The weather and climate are always changing to some degree, but what we see now is that the climate is changing more rapidly, and maybe we’re seeing more extreme weather as a consequence of that,” Brummer says. “Maybe the new varieties that are adapted to a particular region need to be more acute, so we’ll need to breed faster and develop more varieties than in the past. That’s where this method could help. Anything you can do to shorten that time to get new plant varieties out into the field will be useful.”

Challenges Ahead

Thus far, speed breeding has shown the biggest potential in long day species that flower in response to longer days, which makes Hickey and his colleagues confident that it will work with plants like sunflower, pepper, and radish.

“It will be trickier to apply speed breeding to ‘short day’ species like rice, maize, and sorghum,” he says, “but I think there is room for optimization of a rapid cycling system. It’s just a matter of tweaking the photoperiod and temperature regimes.”

In fact, despite peanuts being a “short day” species, some researchers have already shown that speed breeding benefits these legumes as well.

“We have successfully used the speed breeding technique developed by UQ researchers in peanut for a number of years now,” Graeme Wright, a breeder with the Peanut Company of Australia, says. Wright thinks that the long light intervals used in speed breeding may actually be selecting individual plants with day length insensitivity, which he says is “a desirable trait as it means…varieties developed should have wide adaptation to latitude, with reproductive growth not dependent on day length.”

CRISPR and Beyond

This new method should be seen as ammunition that breeders can add to a growing arsenal of genetic weaponry. Over the past few years, advances in genomics have enabled scientists to use gene-editing tools like CRISPR to modify genomes to include things like drought resistance and higher nutrition.

“Speed breeding is one tool in the shed,” Hickey says. “The real impact will come from combining this tool with other technologies we have that are rapidly evolving in the plant breeding space. CRISPR, genomics tools, genomic selection, and prediction.”

But the researchers recognize that it won’t be easy converting all breeders to the speed-breeding regime. Old habits die hard and scientists are inherently skeptical. Add to that the infrastructure changes needed to transition to such a method, and it’s clear there’s a bumpy road ahead. Still, with their recently published paper, Hickey and Wright hope other breeders and researchers will see the potential in their technique.

To those interested in adopting speed breeding, Hickey has a simple suggestion on how to begin — “Just leave the lights on, mate.”

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Vivo V7 Plus Review

Vivo, a Chinese smartphone manufacturer, is attracting a lot of attention at the moment due to its work on an under-glass fingerprint sensor. This technology, which hasn’t been perfected by Apple or Samsung yet, will debut on a Vivo phone in the near future. It won’t be the first time Vivo has been a phone trendsetter; but it’s likely the first time you’re hearing about its devices — you won’t find Vivo phones sold in the U.S. or the U.K.

This is an incredible selfie phone.

But through small steps, Vivo’s international reach is increasing, especially with the launch of the Vivo V7 Plus. Starting out in China and followed by India, the phone is now destined to launch in Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, and several other regions. It’s evidence of Vivo stretching out further into the world. In our Vivo V7 Plus review, we find out if the company is ready for prime time outside China.

A focus on selfies

The reason you’ll want to buy the Vivo V7 Plus is the camera, and not just the rear camera either: This is an incredible selfie phone. The front camera has 24 megapixels and an f/2.0 aperture, along with a Portrait mode, HDR, and a comprehensive beauty mode. Those are better specifications than many other rear cameras, but does it make a difference? It really does, and the selfies you take with the V7 Plus are impressive. With beauty mode active, you have the option of adjusting three parameters — skin buffing, whitening, and skin tone — and provided you don’t just turn them all up to maximum, it’s easy to retain a normal, human look. Just without those tiny little flaws we’d rather hide.

Portrait mode depends on software to blur out the background, rather than a second lens, and it does a good job in normal lighting. It avoids blurring out glasses, but while it can get a little confused with ears, it otherwise effectively isolates your face. The HDR mode isn’t so great, and we often struggled to see the difference when it was turned on. There’s a front-facing flash, a wide array of filters, and a group selfie mode too. Simply put — if you want to take selfies, the V7 Plus is an absolute master.

Both cameras impress

The rear camera hasn’t been forgotten either. It has a single-lens 16-megapixel camera with the same f/2.0 aperture, as well as the beauty mode from the selfie camera too. It’s well-tuned, fast to react, and easy to use. Put up against two other similarly-priced phones, the Vivo V7 Plus took our favorite shot of the afternoon — a clock tower highlighted against clouds and the setting sun, complete with birds flying away to roost. The Vivo V7 Plus took photos we liked with both the front and the rear camera.

It’s not without fault though. Oddly there’s no grid option under the settings, and it has one of those pointless Apple Live Photo rip-offs that we struggle to find a use for. This leads us from the Vivo V7 Plus’ major selling point, to its worst aspect — the software. It runs Android 7.1.2 with November 2017’s security patch, which is an unfortunate, but acceptable start. The current version of Android is version 8.0 with the January security patch. But what bothers us more is how the operating system is covered with Vivo’s own FunTouchOS “theme” or user interface. FunTouch is not much fun at all.

FunTouch is not much fun at all.

We’re not fans of FunTouchOS mainly because it makes you relearn everything you know from other Android phones. Looking for the brightness control? It’s in the notification shade, right? No, it’s actually in a pull up drawer from the bottom of the screen, along with all the other shortcuts. There’s no app drawer, the notifications are massive cards that drop down into view, the network connectivity icon is on the opposite side, and there are various pre-installed apps. It’s not slow, and we didn’t experience any app incompatibility — so it’s not that it doesn’t work — it just wants to be different for no apparent reason. We do like the customizable themes though, accessed through a pre-installed themes app, and Google Play along with all the Google apps are also ready to go. Still, we couldn’t put down the desire to change the launcher on the Vivo V7 Plus.

Software experience lets it down

The Vivo V7 Plus looks good, especially in the black seen here. It’s understated, the antenna bands are split into subtle tram lines around the top and bottom of the device, and the fingerprint sensor is well-placed on the back of the phone. The 6-inch screen has minimal bezels for a really modern look, but we’re disappointed with the 720 x 1,440 pixel resolution. It’s too low, and ruins what could have been a pleasant experience watching high definition video on a large screen. Other quibbles include a MicroUSB charging port rather than a USB Type-C; but at least there is a 3.5mm headphone port.

The phone is powered by a Snapdragon 625 processor with 4GB of RAM, and we ran some benchmark tests to see how it compares to the competition.

• AnTuTu 3D: 56,226
• Geekbench 4: Single-Core: 764; Multi-Core: 3,925
• 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme: 430

The Vivo V7 Plus costs around $350. Do note, if you decide to import one to the U.S., it won’t connect to a 4G LTE service, only 3G, and it’s a GSM phone for use with AT&T or T-Mobile. The price puts it in competition with the Motorola X4, the HTC U11 Life, and beyond the Honor 7X. Its benchmark results are less impressive than the Moto and the HTC phones, and very similar to the Honor 7X. We played Riptide GP2 and found the V7 Plus works well as a gaming device. There’s even a handy little shortcut in the pull-up menu to activate a game mode to silence notifications.

Price is too high

We’re a little confused by the Vivo V7 Plus. The cameras are superb, the screen — although modern looking — isn’t so good, the price is a little too high, and the user interface is quite frustrating. It comes close, but we can’t recommend this phone. If you can live with the operating system, the selfie experience truly stands apart from other phones at this price.

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U.S. Senate approves the renewal of a warrantless surveillance program

On Thursday, January 18, the U.S. Senate voted to approve the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017, which expands the U.S. government’s ability to pursue warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens. The bill was met with a bit of bi-partisan opposition, in the form of a failed filibuster by Senators Ron Wyden, D-OR, and Rand Paul, R-KY. The Senate voted to limit debate to 30 hours, according to Motherboard, effectively putting an end to the filibuster.

The FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act would effectively renew the authorization the U.S. government used to gather surveillance on U.S. citizens without requiring a warrant. The methods fall into two categories: “About collection” and “backdoor search.”

“With backdoor search, intelligence agencies can monitor the communications of any American that has been in touch with any foreigner the agency deems a target,” Motherboard reports, “About collection allows intelligence agencies to monitor the electronic communications of any American that mentions information, such as a phone number or email address, about a foreign target, even if they have never communicated with that foreigner.”

The bill is expected to be signed as soon as it hits President Donald Trump’s desk, at which time the amendments will in effect for six years, when they will be up for reauthorization again.

The American Civil Liberties Union released a coalition letter outlining its opposition to the law, describing it as “short-sighted” and “rushed” given it was put together in 48 hours.

“Indeed, the bill is measurably worse than a short-term straight reauthorization of Section 702 with a sunset. Given this — and the enormous privacy interests at stake — it is astounding that the bill is being rushed through committee and was released less than 48 hours before the scheduled markup,” the Coalition letter reads, undersigned by 36 different groups opposing the passage of the bill.

The ACLU’s criticism stems not only from the drafting of the bill but of the way it reauthorizes provisions of the FISA act, which the ACLU claims are unlawfully interpreted by U.S. law enforcement agencies.

“The broad language of the bill could be interpreted by the government to sweep in individuals only tangentially related to malicious cyber activities,” the Coalition letter reads.

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