Category: International

COVID-19 was a disaster for organ transplants. Here’s how they’re recovering

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Organ transplants in the United States have been increasing over the last several years. In 2019, transplants from deceased donors rose by 10% while living donors increased by 7%. The growing system combines education, technological advances, various research, and public policy work to save lives off the 100,000-person waitlist. While kidneys are the top organ in transplant numbers, other key organs transplanted in America include the liver, heart, and lungs. The transplant community has been working together for years to increase organ donations for those in need. Experts say that deceased donors alone will not resolve the waitlist. Organizations like the American Kidney Fund (AKF), among other things, work to get rid of kidney disease in the first place. They provide education and access to resources to help make it easier, and encourage living donors to save a life. As a kidney donor myself, I can confirm that multiple organizations work hard to make organ donation a safe and rewarding experience. Despite the progress in recent years, more living donors are necessary. Especially now. Beginning in late March of last year as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the U.S., the country’s transplant system came to a screeching halt. Deceased donor donations dropped by 50% and living donor donations dropped by 90%. “The pandemic caught everybody off guard,” says Dr. David Klassen, chief medical officer at United Networks for Organ Sharing (UNOS). “Nobody really saw it coming. Transplant is really a collaborative process by nature.” In order for a surgery to be successful it requires both the transplant center and the donor hospital to be fully operational and functional, along with the organ procurement team for deceased donor organs; potential recipients and donors also have to have access to healthcare. Not only did COVID-19 affect all these groups individually, but it only takes one of them with a problem to disrupt the entire system. Waves of impact Once the pandemic hit, healthcare resources had to pivot Read More …

This new digital rights report flunks the tech giants

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A new report on the human-rights policies of 26 tech and telecom firms around the world delivers a harsh verdict: From Alibaba to Vodafone, they all get an F. The 2020 Ranking Digital Rights Corporate Accountability Index , as previewed in advance of its Wednesday posting, blames this collective failure to get “even close to earning a passing grade” on widespread opacity among these firms in how they analyze, promote, and demote the speech of their customers for marketing, advertising, and content-moderation purposes. That focus on the uses and abuses of algorithms was the major new addition to this corporate scorecard from Ranking Digital Rights (RDR), a project founded by longtime digital-human-rights advocate Rebecca MacKinnon and housed at the nonprofit New America in Washington. Founded with a Knight News Challenge grant and since underwritten by foundation grants and State-Department funding, RDR has graded the policies of tech and telecom companies worldwide since 2015. RDR has yet to hand out a score better than 65 out of 100 (to Google , in 2015 and 2017 ; it’s down to 48 this year). In the new report, Twitter’s score—just 53–was the highest of any company. The report credits Twitter with transparency in such areas as its content-moderation decisions, ad-targeting operations, and government demands that it remove users’ posts. Amazon is way behind its peers in the U.S.” Ellery Biddle, Ranking Digital Rights But the report also knocks the company for not shedding the same light on security practices. In particular, it calls for more disclosure of how Twitter controls employee access to user data, citing Twitter insiders caught spying on Saudi dissidents in 2019 and the July 2020 breach that saw such boldface-name accounts as those of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos hacked to push a Bitcoin scam . Bezos’ own firm Amazon, meanwhile, lands at the bottom of RDR’s digital-platforms list with a score of 20—below even the Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba, the other company the group added to its 2020 list. The report raps Amazon for disclosing so much less than other U.S. firms about its marketing uses of customer data, its oversight of products in its online store, its rules for use of its of its AWS hosting service , and its responses to government demands for customer information. Amazon’s transparency reports have been skimpier than those of other tech giants for years. The latest runs all of three pages and does not itemize requests for data from Alexa devices Read More …

A patent shows how facial recognition drones could identify you from above

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An Israeli biometrics startup called AnyVision with ties to Israel’s military has applied for a U.S. patent on technology that tells drones how to maneuver to capture better facial recognition images of people on the ground. Facial recognition technology has become widely used by law enforcement around the world, but the technology is controversial in part for its accuracy issues, especially when recognizing Black and brown faces. Activists are now calling for ending its use entirely , and police use of facial recognition has already been banned in a host of U.S. cities. The patent application, titled “Adaptive Positioning of Drones for Enhanced Face Recognition,” describes a computer vision system that analyzes the angle of a drone camera in relation to the face of a person on the ground, then instructs the drone on how to improve its vantage point. The system can then send that image through a machine-learning model trained to classify individual faces. The model sends back a classification with a probability score. If the probability score falls below a certain threshold, the whole process starts over again. A future defined by this type of mass surveillance would “obliterate privacy and anonymity in public as we know it,” said Kade Crockford, head of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts who’s led the charge on banning facial recognition in Massachusetts cities, in an interview with Fast Company last year. “Weirdly this is not a hugely controversial issue for voters. People don’t want the government to be tracking them by their face every time they leave their house.” People don’t want the government to be tracking them by their face every time they leave their house.” Kade Crockford As with any patent application, there’s no guarantee the technology will show up in a real product. But it does address a very real technical problem with existing facial recognition systems. Such systems usually process images captured by stationary cameras. Capturing a clear angle on someone’s face, and compensating for bad ones, is always a challenge with these systems. Shooting video from drones that can move around and intelligently zero in on the right angle is a way of taking the chance out of the process. The application, which was originally reported  by  Forbes cybersecurity writer Thomas Brewster, was filed last summer and published by the U.S. Patent Office on February 4. AnyVision , which was founded in 2015, sells artificial intelligence designed to let cameras in retail stores recognize the faces of people on “watch lists” who have been convicted of theft in the past. Read More …

6G internet? Internet pioneer Vint Cerf isn’t buying the hype

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Vint Cerf has seen a lot of upgrades to online access since he cowrote the internet’s core Transmission Control Protocol in 1974. So you’ll have to forgive him for a certain glibness in the recap he recently shared of the last 15 years of wireless connectivity: “2G to 3G to 4G to 5G and whatever the heck 6G is.” Yes, 6G. Although 5G wireless broadband is still emerging from a haze of hype , its still largely hypothetical successor was sparking discussion even before President Trump’s February 2019 tweet demanding “5G, and even 6G, technology in the United States as soon as possible.” The “6G and the Future of the Internet” online panel that featured Cerf (since 2005, a VP and the chief internet evangelist at Google) didn’t put 6G in much of a sharper focus. Instead, he used the event hosted by the nonprofit research organization Mitre to suggest two other pieces of technology that play a critical role in the internet’s future: low-Earth-orbit satellites and undersea cables. If Elon manages to get all 24,000 satellites up, in theory it will be impossible to avoid Internet access.” Vint Cerf on Starlink The activation of swarms of low-orbit satellites, Cerf told Mitre Labs chief futurist Charles Clancy, can help address the enormous demand for rural broadband . Meanwhile, the rapid deployment of undersea cables is helping to ensure that no one country can obtain any sort of chokehold on international internet traffic. Cerf said he sees SpaceX’s growing Starlink constellation and other low-orbit systems as a potential breakthrough, thanks to their potential for fast bandwidth, moderate latency, and near-universal access. “If Elon manages to get all 24,000 satellites up, in theory it will be impossible to avoid Internet access because these things, some of them will even be in polar orbits,” he said of SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s ultimate goal for Starlink Read More …

Facebook has banned Australian news, but there’s a workaround

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Facebook users are currently caught in a fight between the social network and the Australian government over the sharing of news on tech platforms. On Wednesday, Facebook banned users in Australia from sharing links to any local or international news stories, blocked Australian news publishers from sharing their own stories, and prevented users worldwide from sharing news articles published in Australia. The drastic move is a response to the Australian government’s Media Bargaining code, which tries to counter tech giants’ decimation of the news business by making Google and Facebook share some revenue with local news publishers. [Screenshot: Jared Newman] The move by Facebook has sparked an international backlash , with one MP in the United Kingdom calling it “one of the most idiotic but also deeply disturbing corporate moves of our lifetimes.” Amnesty International Australia campaigner Tim O’Connor said that allowing one company to dominate the information ecosystem “threatens human rights,” and criticized Facebook for blocking access to community groups and emergency information. (Facebook itself acknowledged that some Pages were “ inadvertently impacted .”) It’s unlikely that the news ban will last forever, at least in its current form. Australia’s treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, has said that he continues to have constructive discussions with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google has already made its own made its own deal with News Corp, agreeing to pay the publisher for news in United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Deals between Google and other publishers are expected to follow , which could put pressure on Facebook to be less belligerent in its response. But in the meantime, Facebook users are stuck without a way to share reliable information on the world’s largest social media platform. That’s not ideal, given how easily misinformation can flourish on Facebook instead. Fortunately, there is a workaround. Read More …