Category: Tech

Trump supporters believe election whistle blowers because they agree with them

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It’s amazing who right-wing pundits and politicians decide to take at their word. As Donald Trump continues to lose more and more lawsuits intended to overturn his election loss, his supporters in the media and beyond have put an increased emphasis on personal accounts from alleged whistleblowers. “Many [sworn affidavits] have been thrown out and many debunked, but many still have not. These Americans, these whistleblowers, deserve to be taken seriously and at least heard without threat of reprisal, but that’s not happening,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham said recently . Fine, let’s take a look at some of these whistleblowers. There was the woman at Rudy Giuliani’s circus-like hearing in Michigan on Wednesday, December 2, who argued for stringent voter ID laws because “all Chinese people look alike.” There’s the star witness at that same hearing, Dominion Voting Systems contractor Melissa Carone , an irate rambler who came across as an SNL character rejected for being too broad, and who has already become the subject of parody . a drunk woman is trump team’s star witness in michigan pic.twitter.com/qGxEI3hp2G — marisa kabas (@MarisaKabas) December 3, 2020 Then there’s the trio of whistleblowers who appeared on Sean Hannity’s extremely popular Fox News show on Tuesday, December 1, to share their stories of an alleged conspiracy to commit mass voter fraud. First up are USPS subcontractors Ethan Pease and Jesse Morgan. Pease claims that USPS workers were ordered to illegally backdate ballots so that they’d meet the November 3 deadline, while Morgan claims he picked up several pallets worth of ballots in New York and was ordered to bring them across state lines. The stories are only marginally more believable than Roger Stone’s recent claim of North Korean boats dropping off ballots in Maine Harbor . Whether they are true or not is for the judges to decide, but Hannity found them credible enough to put on air for an audience of millions, and the usual suspects tended to agree . Even just on the surface, though, these witnesses don’t seem terribly credible. All we know about them is that they appeared on Hannity fresh from a mostly maskless, indoor press conference , and that despite the host’s repeated insistence that these two are both “non-partisan,” Pease states that his reason for speaking up is that this is the “most important election of our lifetime.” (Hannity does not pursue this inquiry any further.) The third guest on the show manages to be even less credible. Kristina Karamo, an election observer from Michigan, claims that she was ordered to mark multiple ballots for Biden that may hav been mistakenly filled out for both Biden and Trump or Biden and a third-party candidate. She then zooms out to rant about all the general supposed election fraud evidence that the lamestream media is ignoring Read More …

Top AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru says Google fired her over an email

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Timnit Gebru, a high-profile AI ethics researcher and leader in the field, has been forced out of Google. Gebru, who announced the news on Twitter Wednesday night, wrote that she was fired by Google’s head of AI Jeff Dean over an email she had written to a list consisting of women and allies at Google Brain. Read More …

The Democratic operative who beat Trump on Facebook is bracing for the war ahead

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Tara McGowan should be celebrating. Acronym, her three-year-old political outfit, placed an unprecedented $100 million bet on digital ads ahead of last month’s election, with the aim of convincing millions of Americans to vote against Donald Trump, and it appeared to pay off. Still, when we spoke in a wide-ranging conversation about Acronym’s work in 2020 and beyond, the 34-year-old veteran of Democratic campaigns sounded nervous. Trump wasn’t the Democrats’ only opponent: They also faced an unprecedented hurricane of right-wing disinformation that wreaked far more damage than the Kremlin ever could. That Trump won more votes than any incumbent president, and that Republicans succeeded in so many down-ballot races, represents one challenge for Democrats; that Trump hasn’t quite acknowledged his defeat and keeps harping on conspiracy theories represents a bigger one. Tara McGowan [Photo: courtesy of Acronym] These are different problems from Acronym’s original focus. Early on, McGowan had raised the alarm about a Republican “death star” of data and ads, and more than $1 billion in Trump campaign funds—all operating in lockstep with a powerful right-wing media apparatus. To combat it, she raised millions from Hollywood and Silicon Valley billionaires, including Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn, and Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow and the majority owner of The Atlantic . She built a strong team of digital operatives, many of them ex-Facebookers , tasked with bombarding key voters in battleground states with a virtuous circle of microtargeted ads, a monster data machine, and its own network of partisan news sites. Between Acronym’s work and a revamped Democratic data sharing operation, McGowan says the left once again has the digital advantage. “I believe that we definitely closed the gap, and started to leapfrog where Republicans are in terms of digital innovation and infrastructure and investments this cycle.” But the medium for Acronym’s success is also part of the problem, McGowan says. For someone who oversaw the left’s biggest Facebook ad blitz yet, using heaps of Big Tech cash, she has surprisingly little nice to say about the platforms. Now, after helping to accelerate right-wing falsehoods, Facebook and Google are making the problem even worse, she says: The platforms’ new indefinite bans on political ads could give a leg up to wealthier incumbent candidates, who can more easily buy TV spots. But they hurt Democrats in other ways, too: McGowan says the left doesn’t have the same kind of partisan media infrastructure as the right, which can use organic posts on Facebook and Google to circumvent ad bans. McGowan knows the damage that partisan misinformation can do. After a voter tabulation app made by a for-profit spin-off of Acronym failed disastrously during last year’s Iowa caucus, she became the target of a few conspiracy theories herself. (The startup’s name, Shadow Inc., didn’t help.) The incident brought intense scrutiny to Acronym, and its associated super PAC, Pacronym, spooked some donors and fed a burning skepticism about its venture-backed, Silicon Valley-style approach to progressive politics. Read More …

Google wants you to help capture Street View’s next 10 million miles

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In the very near future you’ll be seeing photos shot on smartphones woven into Google Maps’ Street View. Until now, the street-level imagery in Street View has been shot mainly by expensive cameras mounted to the top of vehicles deployed by Google itself. Now some of that job will be outsourced to Android phone users who will use the Street View app to upload their own photos of streets and places. Google says that this will not only allow Street View to keep its imagery of changing neighborhoods more current but also extend its gaze to places it’s never been before, such as streets and roads in rural areas and in developing countries. To weave the user images into a continuous flow, Street View-style, Google says it’ll call on the same software it uses to stitch together the street-level imagery shot by its own car-cams. The software also blurs faces and license plates and places images in the appropriate place on Google Maps. If users capture business storefronts, those can be added to Google Maps along with their name and address, Google Maps product manager Stafford Marquardt tells me. The owner of the business might later come along and claim the listing and perhaps add more information, such as hours of operation, website, and phone number. Previously, Google allowed users in some places to submit Street View imagery shot using rotating cameras mounted to their own vehicles. (Yes, people really do this .) And users have been able to submit single-place photos that are viewable within Maps. But now is the first time Google will accept Street View images shot on smartphones. To submit imagery, you’ll need an Android phone that supports Google’s ARCore augmented reality framework , Marquardt says. The ARCore integration allows a phone to send data from its various sensors—such as the accelerometer and gyroscope—along with the Street View images to help orient them correctly within a place on the map. Google says it will gradually roll out the ability to capture and upload images through the Street View map. It’s already made the feature available to a small percentage of Maps app users in Austin and Toronto and is turning it on for users in New York City Thursday. The camerawork of these contributors will gradually become visible within the Street View app and within Maps on the desktop. Read More …

14 essential Siri time-savers you may have overlooked

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Yes, Siri can set timers, alarms, and reminders. But Apple’s voice-enabled AI assistant is much more capable than you might think. The problem is that Apple hasn’t published a definitive list of all the things Siri can do. And while such a list would likely be overwhelmingly massive, here’s a list of lesser-known commands that are truly useful when it comes to making your day a bit easier. “Open [app name]” Your iPhone’s home screen is an unfortunate mess of folders and apps numbering into the zillions. One result is you can never seem to find those apps you downloaded years ago but only need to use once in a while—there’s just no muscle memory involved. For those times, a quick “Hey, Siri—open Couch to 5K” instantly opens up your virtually-cobwebbed fitness app without requiring you to flick through screen after screen to find it. “Take me home” This one’s a godsend for the perpetually lost—especially when in the car. The phrase opens up Maps and starts navigating you back to the comfort of your abode. “Split a check [number] ways” You’re out eating with friends or coworkers and nobody’s itching to pick up the tab. Read More …