Robotic exosuits will make us better, stronger, faster, right? Not necessarily!

SuitX

Whether it’s the Power Loader from Aliens or Marvel Comics’ amazing Iron Man armor, science fiction has long painted a rose-tinted picture when it comes to the possibility of wearable exoskeleton suits. Like upgraded knights’ armor, these robotic exosuits are promised to transform ordinary fleshy mortals into augmented beings with man-made superpowers: capable of moving faster, lifting heavier and working longer than would ordinarily be humanly possible.

Today, such exosuits are no longer confined to the pages of comic books or far-future science fiction flicks directed by James Cameron. The military is actively investigating the technology for enhancing its soldiers, Edge of Tomorrow-style. On construction sites, exosuits are being used to help workers carry out their job with greater efficiency and minus the wear-and-tear that would normally come along with it. Heck, robot exosuits could even make you a better skier. Ever wanted to shred the slopes like a cyborg? Now you can!

But such tools may not be quite the magic bullet many have hoped for. If the concept of wearing a suit that upgrades your abilities like the Six Million Dollar Man sounds a little too good to be true… well, unfortunately, that may well be because it is.

Exosuits are no longer confined to the pages of comic books or far-future science fiction flicks.

In a new research project carried out by researchers at Ohio State University’s Spine Research Institute, participants were tested in a study involving a commercially available exoskeleton — consisting of a mechanical arm attached to a harness — which is used by workers to help them carry heavy objects hands-free.

The idea is that doing so can greatly reduce the amount of stress put on workers’ arms. However, while the augmented exosuit did indeed manage to achieve this goal, it didn’t entirely erase the wear-and-tear on wearers’ bodies — but instead displaced it onto other parts of their body.

Better, stronger, faster?

“We conducted a biomechanical study on an exoskeleton that was initially designed to help offload the upper body, [particularly the] shoulders and arms,” Eric Weston, a graduate research associate in Ohio State’s Integrated Systems Engineering department, told Digital Trends. “What we were particularly interested in assessing was the potential trade-off that exists with the low back with the use of this device. We saw that such a trade-off does indeed exist. The loads on the discs of the spine in the low back increased by up to 53 percent when the exoskeleton was used compared to if the tasks tested were performed without the intervention.”

The experimental setup had in four situations: the use of lightweight tools at eye height without the mechanical arm (A), the use of heavy tools approximately at hip height without the mechanical arm (B), and the same activities using the mechanical arm (C and D). Weston et al., Applied Ergonomics 2018.

While a 53 percent increased load on the back is bad enough, though, the researchers found that stress on different muscles in the torso actually increased anywhere from 56 percent to 120 percent while users were wearing the exosuit. That should certainly be enough to worry anyone who’s asked to wear an exosuit to carry out heavy work, regardless of what industry they work in!

The study involved 12 subjects who were asked to simulate working using both a torque wrench, a relatively light tool weighing 10 lbs, and a heavier impact wrench, weighing around 30 lbs. The experiment was carried out in a laboratory setting with users wearing and then not wearing the industrial exoskeleton.

“The loads on the discs of the spine in the lower back increased by up to 53 percent when the exoskeleton was used compared to if the tasks tested were performed without the intervention.”

“We recorded how the subjects moved, how they activated their muscles to do the task, and ultimately used a biomechanical model of the low back to predict the forces that were being produced by the trunk muscles and the loads inside their spines,” Weston continued.

“To us, the results were not particularly surprising,” he said, referring to the displacing — rather than eliminating — of impact on the wearers’ body. “Though the subjects no longer need to support the weight of the tool with their upper body when wearing the exoskeleton, this potentially heavy tool is located much further from the back, and the back muscles need to compensate for this by producing more force. This will also create a greater load on the spine.”

Amazing potential, but more work needed

SuitX

This isn’t to suggest that exosuits aren’t capable of carrying out some genuinely amazing feats, of course. Some have allowed individuals with partial paralysis to rise from their wheelchairs and walk again — or even to compete in sports. That’s absolutely phenomenal, and should not be sold short.

Over the long run, the underlying technologies in exosuits will also no doubt continue to be honed so as to produce lighter, cheaper, more versatile and durable wearables able to assist individuals in a range of pursuits.

But, right now at least, it seems that some of the report cards are more likely to read “good first effort” or “must try harder.”

“As researchers, we often talk about solving problems using a systems approach — meaning that solving one problem within a system should not create another problem elsewhere, ” Weston noted while explaining lessons he hopes manufactures will learn. “The results of this study highlight the need to design industrial exoskeletons considering how loads might be shifted or transferred with their use. It is important that the exoskeleton truly supports its wearer as opposed to pushing or pulling on them in ways that force them to fight it.”

Other co-authors on the Ohio State study include Gregory Knapik, Mina Alizadeh and Xueke Wang. Their research paper was published in the journal Applied Ergonomics.

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This self-balancing one-wheeled motorcycle looks extra terrifying

No, it’s not a photograph of a motorbike that has been half-erased using Photoshop, this really is a genuine vehicle. A self-balancing electric one-wheeled motorcycle, the creation is referred to by its creator John Dingley as the Mega Hub Motor Electric Unicycle — because why bother building something this awesome unless you give it a name that sounds like something straight out of a Saturday morning Japanese kids’ cartoon?

The Mega Hub Motor Electric Unicycle (we’ll call it the MHMEU for short) is based on a 3,000-watt brushless hub motor in a 17-inch wheel, with a smaller stabilizer wheel sticking out in front. It utilizes a Kelly motor controller usually found in electric boats and also comprises a jet intake from an old aircraft, and self-balancing components packed into a 1950s Ural motorcycle headlamp pod. The results are something utterly unique.

The project appears not to have been built with any kind of eye on commercialization and is a labor of love on the part of Dingley. If you want to find out a bit more about it, we highly recommending visiting his webpage where there is a series of videos detailing various stages of production.

Dingley claims that learning to ride the vehicle takes just five minutes, but acknowledges that the experience is a bit terrifying. He says that it travels faster than any previous vehicle he has built, but he has yet to go much beyond using 20 percent of its maximum engine power due to, well, concerns about his safety. “The main speed limitation is fear,” he noted.

“The steering system … looks as if you are shifting your weight left and right by turning the handlebars, but actually, this is not true,” he described in one of the previous videos. “You are the heaviest part of the machine, and so when you turn the handlebars, the wheel leans over onto one edge of the tire because the hinge joint at the back between upper and lower parts of the frame is not vertical but angled, and you stay more or less where you were before. The tire contact patch is now curved and so will start you turning to one side.”

The less said about disembarking, the better!

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Harvard is getting ready to resurrect the woolly mammoth

Harvard University’s ambitions to bring back the woolly mammoth appear to be gaining some momentum — and the researchers on the project are gearing up to publicly share some of the details of this real-life Jurassic Park-style dream.

Speaking recently at the Fourth International Vatican Conference in Vatican City, Harvard geneticist Professor George Church described plans to resurrect the woolly mammoth by using gene editing to create hybrid mammoth-elephants, which can then be born using an artificial womb. This would be achieved by creating a “vascularised decidua” using stem cells, resulting in a uterine lining with the necessary blood vessels and vasculature needed to support life.

“We have one paper coming out which is a general method where we can turn stem cells into any tissue you want and in this case, we want decidua, which is the tissue into which the embryos implant, and we’re trying to make a vascularized version of that,” Church told the audience.

As we noted before when describing this project, it started out in 2015, roughly 4,000 years after the woolly mammoth went extinct. The goal is to create a cold-resistant “mammophant” that sports the same shaggy hair, smaller ears and other characteristics as the elephant’s extinct ancestor. To reach this point, researchers in Church’s lab at Harvard have been steadily increasing the quantity of mammoth DNA “edits” it is possible to make into the elephant genome. At present count, the researchers have reportedly isolated and “resurrected” 44 genes from the woolly mammoth.

While the researchers are getting ready to publish some of their findings, however, it is still likely to be around a decade before we reach the point at which a new woolly mammoth can be born. But we’re sure it will absolutely be worth the wait. After all, it’s been four millennia; what difference is eight or nine more years going to make?

The Church lab project isn’t the only woolly mammoth-related project we have covered as of late. Earlier in 2018, we wrote about a massive cross-university research initiative (including Harvard) which successfully sequenced the genome of 14 different species of elephant — ranging from present-day African and Asian elephants to the woolly mammoth and American mastodon.

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International relations are tense in orbit. Is creating a ‘Space Force’ a good idea?

Earlier today, during a speech at the White House, President Donald Trump suggested that he and his administration are considering creating a sixth branch of the U.S. military. “We’re actually thinking of a sixth — and that would be the Space Force,” he said. “Does that make sense? Because we are getting very big in space, both militarily and for other reasons and we are seriously thinking of the Space Force.”

The remarks have been widely panned on Twitter, but despite being an easy target for ridicule, is creating a “Space Force” such a bad idea? Check out this article we published back in 2016, which highlights how relations between China, Russia, and the United States are already quite tense in space. Would creating a space-focused military branch help keep the U.S. safe, or would it merely escalate tensions between world superpowers? Keep reading and decide for yourself.

There’s a cold war happening in space and virtually no one knows about it. Right now, miles above your head, there are fleets of robotic, weaponized satellites poised to do battle as the world’s superpowers await the opening salvo in a very real cosmic chess match.

This might sound like science fiction. It’s not.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States has enjoyed a quarter century of dominance in satellite technology. This advanced web of GPS satellites has given the U.S. military a great advantage on the battlefield, but thanks to robust military investments by Russia and China over the past few decades, this has all changed. Now, a single missile launch could wipe out a satellite and disable the GPS that the U.S. relies on for missile guidance, military operations, and more — so what was once America’s great edge is now a potentially catastrophic vulnerability.

The U.S. is now on the defense, preparing to protect its assets in orbit against a new fleet of high-tech satellites unlike anything the world has ever seen before. This doesn’t bode well for the future, because as history has continuously shown, any technology with potential military applications can (and usually will) spawn an arms race.

This is exactly where we find ourselves today, as the world’s superpowers march in lockstep toward yet another prospective nuclear doomsday.

A new cold war

As one could imagine, the ability to shoot a satellite — traveling at thousands of miles per hour — out of orbit is no easy task. It’s essentially the equivalent of trying to hit a speeding bullet with another speeding bullet from hundreds of miles away.

The message was clear: the next phase of the space arms race had begun.

But as futuristic as this anti-satellite (ASAT) technology may seem, this isn’t a new strategy by any stretch of the imagination. This was very much the next step in the Cold War before the U.S.S.R. dissolved in 1991, with both the U.S. and the Soviet Union testing an array of offensive and defense ASAT systems. Let’s not forget about Reagan’s very real “Star Wars” program.

The Soviets tinkered with everything from manned orbiting space vehicles with onboard rapid-fire cannons to so-called “suicide satellites.” These kamikaze satellites were designed to approach an enemy satellite in orbit and then detonate — a crude and dirty tactic, but all was fair game during the peak of the Cold War. Brinksmanship demanded brinksman-ships.

Up until the 2007, only Russia and the U.S. had demonstrated the capacity to destroy enemy satellites via missile intercept, a feat neither party had demonstrated since the ’80s. Then suddenly in 2007, everything changed when China successfully blew up one of its own weather satellites.

This Chinese test created more than 1,600 pieces of debris, many of which will remain in orbit for decades, with some debris expected to remain in orbit for at least a century. This poses an obvious problem for anything else zipping around at the outer reaches of the atmosphere. The International Space Station has spent much of the past decade dancing around in orbit, dodging debris that could potentially cause catastrophic damage.

If something as small as a nut or bolt — traveling at 17,000 miles per hour — were to collide with another craft in orbit, a debris field of thousands of pieces would be created instantaneously. Each of these chunks of shrapnel exponentially increases the chance of another orbital collision. This dreaded scenario (which is wonderfully illustrated in the film Gravity) is known as Kessler syndrome. The ensuing uncontrollable domino effect that such an event would cause could easily wipe out hundreds of satellites, rendering orbit impossible for decades.

And China blew up that satellite on purpose. This blatant disregard for orbit stability illustrates just how much the world’s most powerful militaries are willing to sacrifice in order to gain a lead in this domain.

The U.S. responded to this Chinese ASAT test with Operation Burnt Frost, successfully destroying its own orbiting satellite. This was the first U.S. ASAT test in more than 30 years. Soon afterward, the U.S. and China created a direct hotline reminiscent of the infamous “red telephone” used for communication between Washington and Moscow during the Cold War.

The message was clear: the next phase of the space arms race had begun.

Robo-satellites, unknown objects, and the pretense of peace

Thanks to seemingly bottomless defense budgets, as well as the tit-for-tat nature of any arms race, the next generation of anti-satellite technologies is already in orbit — with an assortment of others currently in development. These devices range from the unbelievably low-tech — such as a satellite with the ability to blind an enemy satellite’s onboard optics by simply spray-painting over them — to some of the most sophisticated technologies man has ever built.

China, for example, has launched at least one satellite that’s ominously equipped with a robotic arm. The Chinese claim this arm is a prototype of the one they plan to use onboard their space station, but the same arm has the capacity to “throw” another satellite out of orbit, or remove another satellite’s instruments, thereby rendering it useless.

“When the Chinese launched a missile in the summer of 2013, that got a lot of people worried.”

Much to the chagrin of Russia and the United States, this Chinese robo-claw has successfully performed at least one satellite capture procedure in orbit. The satellite is officially recognized by the Chinese government as part of a larger program involving “scientific experimentation satellites,” but the intrinsic dual nature of the grabber technology has only fueled paranoia among top military brass. And other maneuvers haven’t helped.

In 2013, the Chinese launched a rocket they claimed was part of a scientific mission to study the earth’s magnetosphere. The only problem is that, according to the Pentagon, no objects were actually placed into orbit during this exercise. “We tracked several objects during the flight but did not observe the insertion of any objects into orbit, and no objects associated with this launch remain in space,” noted Lieutenant Colonel Monica Matoush, a Pentagon spokeswoman.

Victoria Samson, former Senior Analyst for the Center for Defense Information and current Washington Office director for the Secure World Foundation, explained the situation with an intentional slip of the tongue: “When the Chinese launched a missile — excuse me, a scientific test mission — to [geosynchronous orbit] in the summer of 2013, that got a lot of people worried.”

And China isn’t the only country participating in what might be construed as troubling behavior, either. The movements of several suspect Russian craft have recently received plenty of international condemnation.

One Russian satellite has made at least 11 approaches to its own defunct launch vehicle while in orbit. This suspect activity would appear to any onlooking military as obvious rendezvous and proximity testing. On one occasion, the satellite even collided intentionally with an upper stage rocket, “nudging” it into a higher orbit. This is troubling to military officials for obvious reasons: If a craft can nudge, it can quite easily knock a satellite out of orbit or collide with enough velocity to destroy it.

U.S. Air Force/Wikipedia
U.S. Air Force/Wikipedia

But of course, after all these dodgy maneuvers and astral nudging tests, the Russians assured the international community that the satellites were peaceful in nature — and didn’t bother to elaborate.

It gets better, too. When it comes to Russia, the real cause for concern surrounds a mysterious object known cryptically as 2014-28E. The object first appeared in space soon after the launch of three Russian military communication satellites. Initially, many believed 2014-28E was just another piece of debris left over from the launch. Not long afterward, however, this hunk of space junk began to swiftly change orbit, demonstrating an onboard propulsion system. What exactly 2014-28E is is still unknown, as the Russians have remained tight-lipped on the matter. Many experts fear that these actions signal that the Russians have revived their allegedly-defunct operation known as Istrebitel Sputnik (meaning “Satellite Fighter”), a covert Soviet-era ASAT program.

The U.S. military hasn’t played the role of the choir boy during this whole ordeal, either. It has stoked the flames with its own battle bots for decades. The country’s aforementioned ASAT test in 2008 was a rather unnecessary folderol of saber-rattling in itself.

Russian and Chinese officials have continuously accused the United States of spying on the Chinese Space Station with a top-secret space toy known officially as X-37B. This craft is essentially an unmanned version of the Space Shuttle with a payload bay that’s roughly the size of a pickup truck bed. However, what exactly will be carried and what has been carried on its previous three missions is classified. So too is the entire X-37B budget. Many aeronautic experts dispute claims that the U.S. is using this craft to spy on the Chinese Space Station — but, the complete lack of transparency from U.S. officials hasn’t helped thaw frigid relations between the involved parties.

And the X-37B definitely isn’t the only trick the U.S. has up its proverbial sleeve. Some of America’s most sophisticated ASAT technology is in development as we speak. DARPA, the research and development wing of the U.S. Department of Defense, is now quickly moving along with its Phoenix initiative. The program is based around the concept of a series of robotic craft with the ability to repair damaged satellites from the scraps parts of other defunct satellites already in orbit. Again, from a foreign military perspective, if a satellite has the ability to build something, that satellite also has the intrinsic ability to dismantle something — say, an enemy satellite.

Tit for tat, indeed.

An uneasy peace

Ever since the Sputnik launch, outer space has been the Wild West for space-faring countries. As it turns out, attempting to regulate an infinite space outside of any real unilateral government agency’s control is pretty tricky stuff. In 1967, soon after the U.S. and the Soviet Union had tested a bevy of their nuclear toys in outer space (with the U.S. even considering nuking the moon), both countries signed an agreement called the Outer Space Treaty.

One man’s last-minute decision prevented what could easily have been the beginning of World War III.

Unfortunately, this treaty is as wildly insufficient today as it was then, seeing as it only prohibits the placement of nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction in outer space, and the stationing of such weapons on celestial bodies. It also rather romantically establishes basic principles related to the peaceful use of outer space. The semantics allow for plenty of wiggle room.

Modern space legislation is desperately needed. Russia and China have continuously promoted several legislative updates –most notably the PPWT at the United Nations Conference on Disarmament — to no avail. The U.S. refuses to entertain any legislation that isn’t “verifiable” in nature, which makes it tricky.

“With space, everything is dual-use, so you would be verifying what exactly?” said Samson. “What you need is to know the other actor’s intent, and that’s very hard to do. Increasing transparency can help with that … Not that any country will be 100-percent transparent, but even a small portion can be helpful.”

This sort of minimal transparency eventually helped ease tensions at the peak of the Cold War, when both sides agreed to military site visits and inspections. But in space, at the moment, the sides could not be farther apart on any basic, legal groundwork.

High stakes

On October 27, 1962, a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine had been spotted patrolling near the U.S. blockade line around Cuba, kicking off the Cuban Missile Crisis. In an attempt to bring the submarine to the surface, a U.S. destroyer began dropping non-lethal depth charges.

The captain of the submarine mistakenly believed these charges were an attack and ordered his crew to arm the nuclear-tipped torpedo for launch. If this launch occurred, the U.S. would have presumably retaliated with a barrage of nukes launched at predetermined locations across the USSR.

Per Soviet protocols, all three of the Russian submarine’s commanding officers needed to agree unanimously on the decision to launch the warhead. The second in command, Vasili Arkhipov, refused to consent to a launch. The commanding officers eventually brought the submarine to the surface and returned to Russia without incident.

In essence, one man’s last-minute decision prevented what could easily have been the beginning of World War III.

This is perhaps as close the world has ever come to a doomsday scenario, and it’s chilling to think a moment of indeterminacy would have meant instant annihilation for millions. But unfortunately, the potential for a grave accident due to misinterpretation is dreadfully ripe in the space-age Cold War we’re currently entrenched in.

Wikipedia/NASA
Wikipedia/NASA

“In regards to indeterminacy of an attack: Bingo! Attribution is tremendously difficult,” says Samson. “If a satellite stops working in orbit, it’s not always apparent why. It could be because of faulty parts, solar flares, or deliberate interference.”

Let’s say, for instance, a U.S. intelligence satellite is taken out by a solar flare or fleck of debris while a Chinese or Russian satellite with suspected ASAT potential floats haphazardly nearby. The U.S. would have every reason to believe this was a possible preemptive strike to diminish U.S. GPS capacity before a larger attack. Would defense officials wait calmly with such crucial satellite assets potentially in the crosshairs? Probably not.

While there is currently tremendous potential for a military battle to begin in space, the ensuing war would extend to earth soon thereafter. This unnerving warning was echoed by General John Hyten, head of the U.S. Air Force Space Command. “If war does extend into space someday — and I hope it never does — the first response is not going to be in space,” he warned.

All things considered, it could easily be argued that the risk of an existential threat on this pale blue dot has never been higher. It’s incredible that a nuclear weapon hasn’t been used on civilians in more than 70 years, but most military experts would agree it is a matter of when, not if.

Without meaningful legislation to prevent such a disaster, life on this planet could disappear as quickly as a blip on a radar screen, with only the artificial halo of orbiting trash left to tell the tale.

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How A.I. and a prehistoric creature could help predict animal behavior

Yuste Lab, Columbia University

Like the sentient toys in Toy Story, animals seem to lead exciting lives when humans aren’t watching. Ancient creatures called Hydra, on the other hand, don’t seem to do much at all. But that’s what makes them so interesting.

In a recent study, researchers used a machine learning algorithm — one that is usually used to filter spam email — to catalog Hydra behavior. With one of the simplest nervous system on Earth, Hydra gives scientists a basic sample to study how neural activity relates to physical activity, potentially paving the way for future research into predicting animal behavior.

“Learning animal behaviors from videos is just like learning topics from the text in a document,” Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at Columbia University who led the study, told Digital Trends. “Hours and hours of videos of animal behavior can be considered as documents, and each behavior can be considered as a ‘topic.’ Spam-filtering algorithms are used for automatic text recognition and learn to first classify the potential topics of each document, then pick out topics that could be spam related, for example. It is essentially the same here — we treated videos as collections of visual words … and trained spam-filtering algorithms to pick out the behaviors in each video.”

In prior research, Yuste and his team were able to record the full range of the Hydra’s neural firing in real time, helping them illuminate how the animal’s nervous system controls its behavior.

In this study, they fed the unblinking, spam-filtering algorithm hours of Hydra video — not unlike Alex strapped into a cinema chair in A Clockwork Orange — and programmed it to spot things like motion and shapes, to determine behavioral activities, as the animals were introduced to various environments.

Their hope is that by comparing the animal’s behaviors to the firing of its neurons, they can unlock the link between it’s neural and physical activity.

The method the researchers used is flexible enough to apply larger, more complex animals, Yuste said, “therefore [it] could be widely generalized to any animals of interest, including humans.”

The end goal is to crack the “neural code,” or the connection between nervous system activity and behavior. “If we could do this, we should be able to look at the neuronal activity and predict what the animal is doing and what it wants to do,” Yuste said.

In the more immediate future, the research could help support engineering projects that need stability and control through variable conditions. That’s because, throughout the many hours of video, the Hydra barely changed its behavior.

“This robustness in behaviors implies a robust control from the nervous system, which could be useful for a branch of engineering concerned with maintaining stability and precise control in machines, from ships to planes, navigating in highly variable conditions,” Yuste said.

A paper detailing the research was published in March in the journal eLife.

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Amazon pushes Signal creators to change their anti-censorship tool

For years, Open Whisper Systems has used clever tricks to circumvent censorship of its Signal messaging app on the part of countries trying to silence political dissent. Those methods are getting it into hot water, however. Amazon has warned OWS that Signal’s anti-censorship system violates AWS terms of service not only hiding the true origins of its traffic, but by using a domain it doesn’t have the rights to use — namely, Amazon’s own Souq.com. The chat service doesn’t have permission to use Souq’s internet domain “for any purpose,” Amazon said.

The message warned that Amazon will “immediately suspend” OWS’ access if it continues the practice. OWS unsurprisingly disagrees with Amazon’s stance, arguing that it isn’t disguising the origin of traffic when users connect to Amazon’s service. It’s also using its own web security certificate.

However, the company is more concerned about the lack of viable alternatives. It chose AWS for its anti-censorship tool precisely because it was one of the few major options left that would let Signal avoid a data handshake that revealed the true nature of the traffic, giving censors an easy target. Google made changes to its system in early 2018 that forced OWS to abandon its cloud services, pushing it toward Amazon.

Unless Amazon has a change of heart, OWS might not have much of a choice — it believes its current technique is “now largely non-viable” for those countries where it’s used, such as Egypt, Oman and the UAE. This doesn’t completely rule out circumvention, but it could take time to come up with a “more robust system” given the developer’s small size. While Amazon may have valid security reasons (it doesn’t want clients that set out to deceive users), this could have serious ramifications for residents of affected countries that may either have to accept the likelihood of government spying or go without messaging.

Via: The Verge

Source: Signal

CA court ruling could upend gig economy giants like Uber, Lyft

A recent California Supreme Court decision (PDF) could give Uber and Lyft drivers (as well as other gig workers) fighting to be classified as employees a huge boost. In a case against package and document delivery company Dynamex Operations West, the court has ruled in favor of the plaintiffs — drivers seeking employment status who sued the company way back in 2005. According to the state’s highest court, companies that want to classify their workers as independent contractors have to prove that those workers are running their own business.

They must be able to show that workers are free from the company’s control and direction in their every day tasks and that the work they do is “outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business.” Further, they must be able to prove that workers are running a business of the same type they’re performing for the company. For instance, Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye said, a store that hires a plumber to fix a leak is hiring a contractor, but a clothing maker that hires seamstresses to work at home must pay them as employees.

As SF Chronicle noted, Justice Cantil-Sakauye’s ruling applies to disputes under state Industrial Welfare Commission orders, which set the standards for minimum wages and overtime payments for all employees, but not for independent contractors. Michael Rubin, the lawyer who filed labor unions’ arguments in support of the drivers said the decision is a “boost to cases on behalf of gig economy workers,” since it places the burden on companies to prove that they’re contractors and not employees with the right to wages and benefits. Richard Meneghello, co-chairman of the gig-economy practice group at the management-side law firm Fisher Phillips, agrees: “It’s a massive thing — definitely a game-changer that will force everyone to take a fresh look at the whole issue.”

It remains to be seen how this affects any contractor-related lawsuit filed against companies like Uber, Lyft and Amazon, which classifies its delivery drivers as contractors, going forward. In the past, courts had ruled in favor of the companies and agreed that drivers should be classified as contractors. As for the 300 Dynamex drivers involved in this particular case, they can now pursue a class action lawsuit over a decade after they filed the case.

Source: Supreme Court of California (PDF), San Francisco Chronicle

Facebook is trying to close the book on Cambridge Analytica

Mark Zuckerberg is over it. Yes, Facebook allowed the data of more than 80 million users to land in the hands of a partisan political consulting firm during an obscenely contentious presidential election, but that’s all in the distant past. You know, like last month.

Zuckerberg made it clear during Tuesday’s F8 conference that he’s ready to move past the Cambridge Analytica scandal, starting the whole shebang with a smile and a joke. “This has been an intense year!” he said, practically winking into the Facebook Live cameras.

A few minutes in, his tone shifted to something more serious and he adopted an Obama-esque cadence as he discussed the spread of misleading news, elections tampering and privacy issues on Facebook.

“I’m going to go through all of that head-on in just a minute, because I think it’s important that everyone here knows exactly what we’re doing to address [these issues],” Zuckerberg said. “But we also have a responsibility to move forward.”

And move forward he did.

History, cleared

As promised, Zuckerberg started his F8 speech with a discussion about privacy and security on Facebook, where he touched on steps the company has taken to protect user data since 2014. He noted Facebook was investigating every app with access to large amounts of data before 2014, and he highlighted the privacy pop-up that recently assailed users’ homepages. He explained how new, stricter privacy regulations in Europe would prompt users around the world to review their data settings.

This was all old news. However, it set the stage for the announcement of Clear History, a new tool that will allow users to delete stored information about non-Facebook sites they visit. After explaining how Clear History will work — it’s a lot like deleting cookies from a browser — Zuckerberg closed out the topic with a distinctly Trumpian promise.

“This is the kind of control that we think people should have,” he said. “So we’re building this and we’re going to have a lot more like this to talk about soon.”

The audience applauded and the show carried on, complete with a lineup of new apps and tools designed to collect even more data from users. That’s not how they were presented, of course, but it’s precisely what they’ll do.

We’re going to have a lot more like this to talk about soon.

Mark Zuckerberg

Take Facebook’s new dating feature for example. Zuckerberg emphasized the importance of privacy and safety when it came to building the app, though he discussed these topics in reference to other users, rather than Facebook itself. For instance, users’ Facebook friends won’t be able to see their dating profiles and the feature will display first names only — these are solid steps toward protecting users from other people, but they do nothing to prevent Facebook from gathering (and potentially mishandling) even more personal data.

There are also the fresh augmented reality tools rolling out for developers, including updated facial-recognition and location-tracking features; heaps of third-party integrations with Instagram and Instagram Stories; and new features designed to get more people using WhatsApp and Messenger.

Meanwhile, WhatsApp founder Jan Kuom left the company just a day before F8, reportedly over Facebook’s desire to collect user data and weaken the app’s encryption. Zuckerberg addressed his departure on-stage at F8, saying, “We have built the largest fully encrypted communication network in the world, and this would not have happened without Jan.” He paused for another round of applause, and the show moved on once more.

Facebook clearly isn’t slowing down. Even as it investigates other apps for Cambridge Analytica-level privacy breaches, the company is diving into even more personal territory and planning to collect even more sensitive information from users. And, most likely, users will happily let Facebook take that data.

Facebook isn’t losing users and it’s still making plenty of money — even after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke; even after the number of affected users grew from 50 million to 87 million; even after Zuckerberg spent two days testifying before the Senate about its privacy practices and left dozens of questions unanswered.

How many other apps had unwarranted access to user data? How many of these apps have been banned? What has Facebook’s internal auditing process been like? How did the Cambridge Analytica misuse go undetected, even by third-party investigators? Will more restrictive European privacy laws change the way Facebook treats data in the rest of the world?

These are just a few of the questions that Facebook will “talk about soon,” according to Zuckerberg. And it’s true, Facebook will inevitably have to talk about its privacy practices in the future, perhaps in relation to an unforeseen breach tied to Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, its new dating feature or another one of its properties.

Regardless of the scandals staring down Facebook in the future, Zuckerberg’s F8 presentation demonstrated the company’s eagerness to put Cambridge Analytica, at least, in the past.

“We need to make sure that this never happens again,” Zuckerberg said. It wasn’t a promise or a guarantee — but then again, it didn’t need to be. F8 is about the future, yes, but it’s mainly about selling the vision of the future that Facebook wants. And that doesn’t include Cambridge Analytica.

“We’re all here because we are optimistic about the future,” Zuckerberg said. “We have real challenges to address, but we have to keep that sense of optimism, too.”

Click here to catch up on the latest news from F8 2018!

Facebook and RED are building a camera for 3D VR video

Most VR video isn’t immersive in the truest sense. You can spin around, but you can’t lean forward or step to the side to get a better view. Facebook and RED are helping to fix that — they’re partnering on an “all-in-one” camera that offers six degrees of freedom for 3D and 360-degree video capture. The team-up will combine Facebook’s depth detection technology with RED’s low-light performance to record all the 3D information in a scene (not just those in well-lit areas) to give you the freedom to walk around in a video.

The collaboration is still in its early days, and there’s no mention of an expected release window (you can assume the end result will be expensive). As it is, you’ll also need a headset with those six degrees of freedom to take full advantage of the added immersion. That currently means high-end headsets like the Oculus Rift (with a 3D tracking system) and HTC Vive, not three-degrees headsets like the Oculus Go.

If and when everything comes together, though, the result could make a stronger case for VR video than what’s available today — you could explore video environments on your own terms instead of relying on the cinematographer’s camera placement. And that’s important for Facebook, which is pushing VR video as a key selling point for both the social network itself and for Oculus hardware.

Source: Oculus

Sony’s ‘open-ear’ Xperia Ear Duo buds ship in the US May 25th

Sony’s Xperia Ear Duo “open-ear” buds will debut on May 25th in the US. Sony had already opened pre-orders at Amazon, and now you can place an advance order via brick-and-mortar gadget retailer b8ta. They’ll set you back $280, with a choice of black or gold designs.

The Xperia Ear Duo is designed to let you hear music (or podcasts or notifications) and your surroundings at the same time. The earbuds are compatible with iPhone and Android, as well as their respective voice assistants. The buds automatically adjust the volume depending on the ambient noise levels, and you can skip tracks and answer calls with head gestures — as long as you’re not already headbanging to metal, we assume.

The Xperia Ear Duo emerged after a similar concept faced public scrutiny in a beta test under Sony’s Future Lab wing, where volunteers tried out the system for around a year. That guided Sony in removing the concept device’s camera and turning a neckband into earbuds.