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San Diego Repeals Controversial COVID Vaccine Mandate for City Workers + More
San Diego Repeals Controversial COVID Vaccine Mandate for City Workers
The San Diego Union-Tribune reported:
San Diego has repealed a controversial COVID-19 vaccine mandate for city workers that had led to multiple lawsuits, the firings of 14 employees and resignations by more than 130 police officers.
City officials said drops in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in recent months prompted the repeal, which the City Council approved unanimously Tuesday.
The council simultaneously voted to lift the city’s COVID-19 state of emergency declaration next month, following a similar move by the state that Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in October. Both the city and state emergency declarations will expire on Feb. 28.
Because the council must approve the repeal of the vaccine mandate a second time at a subsequent meeting, it won’t officially expire until March 9 — 30 days after the second vote.
WEF Hears About Technology That Allows Your Thoughts to Be Monitored
The annual World Economic Forum (WEF) gathering has always been a testing ground for some bizarre ideas, which nonetheless serve a purpose: to introduce, and if possible normalize all kinds of mass surveillance and sometimes extremely privacy-invasive technologies.
And monitoring people’s brain activity, including via implants — surely, it doesn’t get much more invasive than that. Yet this was one of the technologies presented at an event in Davos this year by Duke University Professor Nita Farahany.
“Decoding complex thought,” is already possible, Farahany said during her “Ready for Brain Transparency?” talk at the WEF summit last week. And the tech now is also able to reveal the degree of stress somebody is experiencing, as well as what they are paying attention to. So, the goal is to know what/how a person is feeling, what they are thinking, and what draws their interest.
According to the professor, all the ingredients are here — all that’s needed is massive uptake, and eventually a shift from today’s devices that accomplish it — wearables — towards “implanted (brain) technology.”
Vaccine Passport Prohibition Bill Moves Forward in Its Second Year
On Tuesday afternoon, HB131, the vaccine passport prohibition bill, received a favorable recommendation from the House Business and Labor Committee with a 10 to 2 vote. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Walt Brooks, said in the committee hearing that during the COVID-19 pandemic, HIPAA laws were becoming blurred, and he would like to un-blur them.
“All of a sudden, those (HIPAA) laws became all gray and fuzzy, and no one cared anymore,” Brooks said. “This bill basically takes us back to that time, re-brightens those lines that what is protective health information is just that, your private protected health information.”
“The thing I am trying to address is before we had COVID, what was the standard of business, and how did we operate? And this goes and reminds us of the laws that are already in action. We did not ask anyone for their papers, and no one would even think of that,” Brooks said.
All public commenters agreed with Brooks’s views, as no one spoke against the bill, with most being business owners. Some said they don’t want to be asking customers for vaccine information, while others cited the U.S. and Utah constitutions with the legality of doing so.
Are Digital Wallets Safe? Here’s What to Know as the Battle Between Big Banks and Apple Pay Heats Up
In the face of inflation, rising interest rates and slowing economic growth, there’s more competition than ever for consumers’ cash — and even how their purchases are made. Now, several of the large banks behind Zelle are teaming up to create their own digital wallet in a bid to compete with Apple Pay and PayPal, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal.
The move is seen as an effort to slow Apple’s push into consumer financial services, marked by the recent introduction of Apple Pay Later, as well as an interest-bearing savings account administered by Goldman Sachs.
During the pandemic, shoppers showed a growing preference for cashless transactions and still do: Peer-to-peer payment apps — known as P2P — such as Zelle and PayPal’s Venmo, which let users store their banking information on their smartphone, have exploded in popularity.
But it is not without risk. Users are vulnerable to fraud or scams or can lose money if they accidentally send a payment to the wrong person, a Consumer Reports analysis found.
Florida Eyes Banning TikTok at State Universities
University officials in Florida are considering a possible ban on TikTok that could block students from using the popular application on 12 campuses across the state.
Members on the Board of Governors over state universities, meeting Tuesday in Miami, expressed support for creating a system-wide policy outlawing the app. The change could be introduced in the next two months with scrutiny mounting towards the Beijing-based company.
Several schools across the country have already blocked TikTok from their networks, including the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Oklahoma.
JP Morgan Under Senate Fire for Partnership With TikTok Parent ByteDance
JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon is under fire from a top Senator who is raising alarms about the biggest bank in the U.S. developing payments technology for TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance — a partnership first reported by Forbes.
“It is outrageous that JPMorgan Chase would elect to join ByteDance in a partnership geared toward broadening and deepening the company’s, and as a result, the CCP’s, access to countless volumes of user data,” Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote to the JP Morgan Chairman this month
“Assisting online companies to build out real-time payments systems, centralize banking structures and streamline access to millions of users’ financial information is no doubt lucrative,” he said in the letter. “However, by partnering with ByteDance to develop a treasure trove of private data, including that of millions of Americans, JPMorgan Chase has effectively handed the combination to the vault to the CCP.”
Short of the passage of a national security deal by CFIUS or a blanket ban on TikTok in the U.S., lawmakers may go after companies and institutions instead — and JP Morgan is not the only one. ESPN is under pressure from a bipartisan duo in Congress to end a partnership with TikTok, and a House Republican this month introduced legislation that would yank federal funding to colleges in Texas that don’t ban TikTok on their campuses.
Apple Beefs Up Smartphone Services in ‘Silent War’ Against Google
Apple is taking steps to separate its mobile operating system from features offered by Google parent Alphabet, making advances around maps, search and advertising that have created a collision course between the Big Tech companies.
The two Silicon Valley giants have been rivals in the smartphone market since Google acquired and popularized the Android operating system in the 2000s.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs called Android “a stolen product” that mimicked Apple’s iOS mobile software, then declared “thermonuclear war” on Google, ousting the search company’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt from the Apple board of directors in 2009. While the rivalry has been less noisy since then, two former Apple engineers said the iPhone maker has held a “grudge” against Google.
One of these people said Apple is still engaged in a “silent war” against its arch-rival. It is doing so by developing features that could allow the iPhone maker to further separate its products from services offered by Google. Apple did not respond to requests for comment.
Teens Carry a Threat to Mental Health in Their Pockets + More
Teens Carry a Threat to Mental Health in Their Pockets
Unlike the profanity or racy lyrics that were supposedly corrupting young minds when I was a child, today’s fears over social media have a much stronger basis in reality.
The Seattle Public Schools jumped deep into the middle of this debate a few weeks ago when the district sued social media giants Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and others, arguing the companies were contributing to the youth mental health crisis. The Kent school district followed suit shortly after.
In an interview last week, San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge, the author of “iGen,” which focused on Gen Z and the impact of social media on young people, said there is much reason for concern.
She said beginning in the early 2010s, we began to see some alarming trends in mental health for teen girls, in particular. Hospital admissions for self-harm in 10- to 14-year-old girls tripled over the following decade and suicide rates among that age group doubled. Twenge’s research showed major depressive episodes among 12- to 17-year-old girls increased by 52% as well. There was not a correlating increase in other age groups.
Learning to Lie: AI Tools Adept at Creating Disinformation
Artificial intelligence is writing fiction, making images inspired by Van Gogh and fighting wildfires. Now it’s competing in another endeavor once limited to humans — creating propaganda and disinformation.
Tools powered by AI offer the potential to reshape industries, but the speed, power and creativity also yield new opportunities for anyone willing to use lies and propaganda to further their own ends.
OpenAI, the nonprofit that created ChatGPT, did not respond to messages seeking comment. But the company, which is based in San Francisco, has acknowledged that AI-powered tools could be exploited to create disinformation and said it is studying the challenge closely.
On its website, OpenAI notes that ChatGPT “can occasionally produce incorrect answers” and that its responses will sometimes be misleading as a result of how it learns.
U.S. Officially Sues Google, Claiming It Has a Digital Ad Monopoly
The U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit against Google over alleged antitrust issues, claiming the search giant has monopoly control of the digital ad market. The DOJ is joined by eight states in its complaint, including New York, California, Colorado and more. This action was tipped as early as late 2021 and has clearly been in the works for quite a while.
The DOJ bases its argument around perceived ill intent by Google in architecting the digital ad market in a way that unfairly favors its own products.
For its part, Google has frequently reiterated that the digital ad market is healthy and competitive, citing strong competitors including Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, to name a few. The company is also likely to point to growing competition from platforms including TikTok and Instacart, which have cut into the significant market share owned by Alphabet and Meta for most of recent history.
Service Members Forced to Pay Back Signing Bonuses After Being Fired Over COVID Vax: ‘Kick in the Face’
U.S. service members who were fired for refusing to comply with the Pentagon’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate are now being forced to pay back their original recruitment bonuses, which they tell Fox News Digital is a “kick in the face” after years of dedicating their lives to protecting the country.
One former Army soldier who was fired for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine last May told Fox News Digital that he would have to pay back his original signing bonus upon his termination from the military because he did not complete the commitment in his contract.
“The Department of Defense continues to fall short on reestablishing trust for wrongdoings, and this is yet another example of that,” another service member told Fox News Digital, who said the recoupment of signing bonuses is the “icing on the cake” of the Pentagon’s recent treatment of troops.
Lawmakers are pressuring the Pentagon to do more and provide back pay for the roughly 8,400 U.S. troops fired after refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine. However, the Pentagon has said back pay for troops fired for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine is not an issue the DOD is “pursuing.”
Mississippi Doctor Against Vaccine Mandate Runs for Governor
A Mississippi doctor who leads a group of physicians opposed to COVID-19 vaccine mandates has filed paperwork to challenge Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves in the state’s Republican primary.
Dr. John Witcher is the only Republican other than Reeves who has entered the gubernatorial primary so far. He’s best known for founding Mississippi Against Mandates, a group of doctors opposed to requiring COVID-19 vaccines.
Witcher has said he was fired from a Mississippi hospital in 2021 after switching patients’ COVID-19 medication to ivermectin, an anti-parasite drug that is not authorized by the FDA for use against the novel coronavirus and which research shows doesn’t work.
Chicken Fried Data: Chick-Fil-A Hit With Class-Action Privacy Lawsuit Over Video Data Collection
While Chick-fil-A was serving you sandwiches, it was also serving up data to Facebook’s parent company Meta. According to a new lawsuit filed Sunday, the fast food chain did that in a way that violated one of the only federal privacy laws in the United States.
Like hundreds of millions of other websites, evergreenhills.com has an embedded Meta pixel, a tracker that sends the social media company data about who’s visiting the site. Companies like Chick-fil-A use that information to retarget people with ads and measure how well ad campaigns are working. The plaintiffs allege that Chick-fil-A broke a law called the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which says you can’t share personally identifiable information about people’s video viewership without their consent.
Contrary to popular belief, there are basically no privacy laws in the United States, especially at the federal level. The few state laws related to data privacy, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act, give you some rights after the data is collected, but they generally require companies to get your consent. But when there’s video involved, you step into a legal gray area.
TSA Seizes Passport of Turning Point USA Journalist Returning From Davos
Morgonn McMichael is a full-time journalist and Ambassador with Turning Point USA in Tempe, Arizona. She traveled to Davos, Switzerland to cover the World Economic Forum (WEF), but on her return trip, she learned that her name had been added to a TSA list that resulted in her being detained and searched at five different security checkpoints, including her destination at Phoenix International Airport.
There will undoubtedly be more details on her story, but she has clearly been targeted by some Technocrat within the government who wants to send a message to all journalists who would dare to be critical of the WEF’s narrative. This is one of the most egregious violations of First Amendment rights in recent times.
EU Technocrat Threatens Musk With ‘Sanctions’ Unless He Stamps Out Free Speech on Twitter
The battle over Twitter is often made to appear complex and chaotic, but it can all be boiled down to a simple dichotomy — it’s about the people who demand censorship in favor of the establishment narrative vs. the people who want free speech and fair rules applied to everyone equally. Everything else is noise and distraction.
Complications arise when we try to define free speech when it comes to social media. Private companies are not subject to many legal boundaries related to free speech rights. This is an argument that the political left and government representatives made constantly during the massive purge of conservative and liberty-oriented accounts by Big Tech companies since 2016. And, as we saw with Twitter previous to Elon Musk‘s takeover, governments took full advantage of this legal loophole in order to silence people using social media websites as middlemen.
The ongoing release of the Twitter Files proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that collusion between Big Tech and governments for the sake of censorship is a reality. In America, at least, this is a constitutional no-no. The fact that politicians and agencies like the FBI were actively seeking out and targeting ideological opponents and having them silenced on Twitter is a direct violation of the 1st Amendment and these people should be subject to prosecution (the FBI even shelled out at least $3 million to Twitter for services rendered).
The reality that Twitter was acting as an enforcement agent for government censorship around the world tells us exactly why so many establishment officials have been up in arms over Musk’s purchase of the platform. Until now, every single major Big Tech company has been operating in lock-step with the establishment narrative. People couldn’t even talk about Hunter Biden’s laptop, let alone talk about the inconvenient facts surrounding “climate change” or the COVID mandates and vaccines.
This is a dynamic that elitists would still like to keep in place, and they are looking to use international trade rules as a means to pressure Musk into conforming. EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency Věra Jourová makes a statement from the frozen doorstep of Davos arguing that Twitter is subject to EU rules for preventing “harm to society.”
China Is the World’s Biggest Face Recognition Dealer
Early last year, the government of Bangladesh began weighing an offer from an unnamed Chinese company to build a smart city on the Bay of Bengal with infrastructure enhanced by artificial intelligence. Construction of the high-tech metropolis has yet to begin, but if it proceeds it may include face recognition software that can use public cameras to identify missing persons or track criminals in a crowd — capabilities already standard in many Chinese cities.
The project is among those that make China the world leader in exporting face recognition, according to a study by academics at Harvard and MIT published last week by the Brookings Institution, a prominent think tank.
The report finds that Chinese companies lead the world in exporting face recognition, accounting for 201 export deals involving the technology, followed by U.S. firms with 128 deals. China also has a lead in AI generally, with 250 out of a total of 1,636 export deals involving some form of AI to 136 importing countries. The second biggest exporter was the U.S., with 215 AI deals.
The fact that the U.S. is the world’s second-largest exporter of face recognition technology risks undermining the idea — promoted by the U.S. government — that American technology naturally embodies values of freedom and democracy.
French Privacy Chief Warns Against Using Facial Recognition for 2024 Olympics
The French data protection authority’s president Marie-Laure Denis warned Tuesday against using facial recognition as part of the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics security toolkit.
The French government is seeking to ramp up France’s arsenal of surveillance powers to ensure the safety of the millions of tourists expected for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics. The plans include AI-powered cameras for the first time — but not facial recognition.
Civil liberties NGOs such as La Quadrature du Net and the Human Rights League are currently campaigning against experimental AI-powered surveillance cameras. Denis however tried to assuage concerns.
Jarring Photos Show Difference Between China’s COVID Lockdown and Today
Monday marked the three-year anniversary of when the Chinese city of Wuhan was placed under a lockdown to combat the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020, weeks before other nations throughout the world would start to impose their own measures.
Though major Chinese cities like Shanghai and Beijing may have outpaced the city in terms of name recognition throughout the world years ago, Wuhan gained international attention on January 23, 2020, when it was placed under a 76-day lockdown to curb a COVID-19 outbreak.
Photos of Wuhan at the time showed a reality likely unfamiliar to many in the world up until that point: medical staff covered head to toe in hazmat suits and other protective gear, face mask-wearing civilians queuing to have their temperatures checked, crowds of people waiting for medical treatment in hospitals and the sick laid out on stretchers.
Pictures of the city in the present day, three years after the fact, seem to show at least a slight return to normalcy for residents who began to experience life in a pandemic before much of the rest of the world.
Cashless Society: Big Banks Prepare to Launch Digital Wallet to Compete With Apple Pay and PayPal + More
Cashless Society: Big Banks Prepare to Launch Digital Wallet to Compete With Apple Pay and PayPal
Major U.S. banks, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan and others, will push into the digital wallet space in the second half of this year to take on Apple Pay and PayPal.
Early Warning Services LLC (EWS), the bank-owned company that operates the money-transfer service Zelle, will be managing the new digital wallet, according to WSJ. The wallet has yet to be named but will be separate from Zelle and allow shoppers to pay at merchants’ online checkouts with linked debit and credit cards.
The move towards electronic and contactless payments has been gradual but could soon be thrown into hyperdrive if enough consumers adopt EWS’ new wallet. It was during the coronavirus pandemic that the government, Federal Reserve and corporations urged people to avoid unnecessary physical transactions that increased the push toward a cashless society.
The dystopic view is that a cashless society could mean governments and corporations will have even more control over our wallets — and that’s frightening.
Supreme Court Puts off Considering State Laws Curbing Internet Platforms
The Supreme Court asked the Biden administration on Monday for its views on whether the Constitution allows Florida and Texas to prevent large social media companies from removing posts based on the views they express.
The practical effect of the move was to put off a decision on whether to hear two major First Amendment challenges to the states’ laws for at least several months. If the court ends up granting review, as seems likely, it will hear arguments no earlier than October and will probably not issue a decision until next year.
The laws were challenged by two trade groups, NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which said the First Amendment prohibits the government from telling private companies whether and how to disseminate speech.
The Texas law differs in its details, Judge Andrew S. Oldham wrote in a decision upholding it. “To generalize just a bit,” he wrote, the Florida law “prohibits all censorship of some speakers,” while the Texas law “prohibits some censorship of all speakers” when based on the views they express.
Microsoft Investing Billions in ChatGPT Maker
Microsoft is investing billions of dollars into OpenAI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT language generation tool, as part of a third phase of a partnership between the two tech companies, Microsoft announced Monday.
Microsoft did not detail the exact amount it is investing in OpenAI with the latest phase, describing it as a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment.” Semafor previously reported the company was in talks to invest $10 billion into the artificial intelligence company.
The investment adds to the ones Microsoft made in OpenAI in 2019 and 2021 and extends the partnership between the companies as ChatGPT becomes increasingly popular.
End the Persecution of Unvaccinated New Yorkers, Like Me
You wouldn’t know it from the lack of headlines, but COVID vaccine mandates were struck down in court again last week, this time for New York state health workers. The common-sense decision was based on the well-established fact that the vaccines don’t stop infection or transmission. But does anyone even care about facts, here in the land of COVID-emergency-forever?
Unlike almost anywhere else in the country, unvaccinated parents here are still denied entry to their children’s public schools, and unvaccinated 2020 heroes are still fired, prohibited from working as educators, healthcare workers, firefighters or any of the other essential jobs they fulfilled during the height of the pandemic.
This scandalous injustice persists despite a state-court ruling in October that also declared the city’s vaccine mandates arbitrary and capricious. The ruling cited CDC guidelines and the state Constitution, which says: “No person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws of this state or any subdivision thereof.” Mayor Eric Adams filed an appeal the very next day.
As an unvaccinated New Yorker, I experienced the consequences of this groupthink firsthand. For months I was barred from cafes, theaters and museums with my children. Most painfully, I was kept from my daughter’s school spring concert and made to stand outside in the schoolyard and watch through an open back door.
GOP Rep. Andy Biggs Reintroduces Multiple Bills to ‘Address COVID Overreach’
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) reintroduced multiple bills to “address COVID overreach on Americans.” Biggs shared an update in a press release on Monday.
“Now with a Republican majority in the House, we have a better opportunity to pass legislation that reverses COVID vaccine and mask mandate policies set by fanatics who seek to maintain control over Americans,” Biggs said.
“These power-hungry individuals are rejecting science. COVID cases and deaths remain low. Normal life has returned,” he added. “Most importantly, individuals should be making their own COVID and healthcare choices — not tyrannical government officials. All types of COVID-related mandates have got to go and these pieces of legislation help us get there.”
VP Harris Required People to Sign ‘Attestation of Vaccination’ Paper to Attend Her Florida Speech: Reports
Vice President Kamala Harris required all attendees of her event on Sunday in Tallahassee, Florida to sign a form confirming whether they have been vaccinated or not, according to reports.
The form was titled, “Attestation of Vaccination,” and it required guests to indicate whether they are unvaccinated, partially vaccinated or vaccinated.
Those who declined to indicate either were required to provide proof that they completed a COVID-19 test within three days of the event and received a negative result, wear a mask and socially distance themselves from others.
Navajo Nation Rescinds Mask Mandate on Vast Reservation
The Navajo Nation has rescinded a mask mandate that’s been in effect since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, officials announced Friday, fulfilling a pledge that new tribal President Buu Nygren made while campaigning for the office.
The mandate was one of the longest-standing anywhere in the U.S. and applied broadly to businesses, government offices and tourist destinations on the vast reservation, which extends into New Mexico, Utah and Arizona. The tribe at one point had one of the highest coronavirus infection rates in the country and among the strictest measures to help prevent the spread of the virus.
Nygren and Navajo Nation Council Delegate Otto Tso, who temporarily is overseeing the tribe’s legislative branch, jointly announced the lifting of the mask mandate on social media Friday evening.
‘Ready, Willing and Able’: COVID Vaccine Policies at Ontario Hospitals Are Keeping Some Health Workers From Filling Dire Staff Shortages
About 160 veteran nurses, personal support workers and healthcare technicians, along with their families, gathered in a church hall in Port Perry, Ont., in person or by video conference, on a snowy afternoon this past Saturday.
These distressed individuals have a message for patients waiting for healthcare in the province: we want to work on the front lines but are being shut out. “I am ready, willing and able to work,” Lori Turnbull told CTV National News. But nobody will hire her.
All of the health workers in this unusual audience were terminated after declining to get two COVID-19 vaccinations in 2021, as required by all 140 of Ontario’s public hospitals and some nursing and retirement homes.
Despite Ontario dropping its health sector mandate in March, the Ontario Hospital Association (OHA) continues to recommend the continuation of mandatory vaccination policies among the province’s 140 public hospitals.
Rentokil Pilots Facial Recognition System as Way to Exterminate Rats
The world’s largest pest control group is piloting the use of facial recognition software as a way to exterminate rats in people’s homes.
Rentokil said it had been developing the technology alongside Vodafone for 18 months.
The surveillance technology, which is already being tested in real homes, tracks the rodents’ habits and streams real-time analysis using artificial intelligence.
In developing the technology, Rentokil watched rats in a controlled environment, with cameras monitoring their behavior patterns. Machine learning using an AI system allows it to build recognition capabilities.
Tony Blair Calls for Digital Libraries to Track Vaccines — ‘You Need the Data, You Need to Know’ + More
Tony Blair Calls for Digital Libraries to Track Vaccines — ‘You Need the Data, You Need to Know’
Tony Blair has called for digital libraries that can record the vaccination status of people around the world in future pandemics.
In a World Economic Forum discussion on containing the next major viral disease outbreak, the former prime minister said all countries need “proper digital infrastructure” to identify who has received vaccines.
Blair said: “In the end, you need the data: you need to know who’s been vaccinated and who hasn’t been. For some of the vaccines that will come down the line, there will be multiple shots. So [for vaccines] you’ve got to have — for reasons to do with healthcare more generally but certainly, for pandemics — a proper digital infrastructure and most countries don’t have that.”
Blair has long called for the deployment of tech to record vaccine statuses worldwide. In a 2021 article on “How to Vaccinate the Whole World,” Blair said “systematization of all the information involved in the vaccine rollout will provide vital data” and “allow governments to focus accurately [on] the deployment of vaccines and track progress.”
What You Need to Know About the U.S. Government’s Surveillance of Money Transfers
If you’ve sent a money transfer of over $500 to another person in recent years, there’s a decent chance U.S. law enforcement agencies could know about it. That’s according to new documents unearthed by The American Civil Liberties Union and The Wall Street Journal that show more than 600 law enforcement agencies reportedly had access to a database that includes more than 150 million transfer records for Americans and people from more than 20 different countries.
Officers were reportedly able to access those records, which include the full names of senders and recipients, without a warrant. In a statement sent to Gizmodo, the ACLU described the previously undisclosed monitoring system as, “One of the largest government surveillance programs in recent memory.”
Law enforcement agencies, from small-time local police departments to some of the largest federal policing agencies, accessed the records from a shadowy database housed in Arizona. Ostensibly, those records would help law enforcement collect evidence of fraud, money, laundering and other crime.
Critics, however, say the program vastly overstepped its reach and potentially puts at risk immigrant and low-income communities most likely to use money transfer systems.
Meta, Twitter, Microsoft and Others Urge Supreme Court Not to Allow Lawsuits Against Tech Algorithms
A wide range of businesses, internet users, academics and even human rights experts defended Big Tech’s liability shield Thursday in a pivotal Supreme Court case about YouTube algorithms, with some arguing that excluding AI-driven recommendation engines from federal legal protections would cause sweeping changes to the open internet.
The diverse group weighing in at the Court ranged from major tech companies such as Meta, Twitter and Microsoft to some of Big Tech’s most vocal critics, including Yelp and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Even Reddit and a collection of volunteer Reddit moderators got involved.
In friend-of-the-court filings, the companies, organizations and individuals said the federal law whose scope the Court could potentially narrow in the case — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — is vital to the basic function of the web. Section 230 has been used to shield all websites, not just social media platforms, from lawsuits over third-party content.
In their filing, Reddit and the Reddit moderators argued that a ruling enabling litigation against tech-industry algorithms could lead to future lawsuits against even non-algorithmic forms of recommendation and potentially targeted lawsuits against individual internet users.
Judge Blasts James Dolan’s Facial Recognition Bans From MSG: ‘Stupidest Thing Ever’
A powerful judge blasted James Dolan’s bizarre ban on his legal enemies from Knicks games as “totally crazy” and “the stupidest thing ever,” but the billionaire nevertheless stepped up the controversial clampdown just days later, court papers reveal.
The mercurial media mogul — who reportedly has used creepy facial-recognition software to bar unwelcome attorneys and critics from entering Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall — took heat in early November over the high-tech tactics from Delaware Chancery Court Judge Kathaleen McCormick, according to little-noticed court papers.
In a sarcastic response, Judge McCormick shot back that attorneys inside Madison Square Garden’s venues might do “something as horrific as watch a play, a sporting event, order a hot dog or use the bathrooms, these sorts of threatening acts.”
TikTok’s Secret ‘Heating’ Button Can Make Anyone Go Viral
For years, TikTok has described its powerful For You Page as a personalized feed ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app.
But that’s not the full story, according to six current and former employees of TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, and internal documents and communications reviewed by Forbes. These sources reveal that in addition to letting the algorithm decide what goes viral, staff at TikTok and ByteDance also secretly hand-pick specific videos and supercharge their distribution, using a practice known internally as “heating.”
Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count. This suggests that heating has potentially benefitted some influencers and brands — those with whom TikTok has sought business relationships — at the expense of others with whom it has not.
There is a fraught history of tech platforms using their discretion to increase specific posts’ reach. Human curation has helped platforms create safe experiences for children and keep misinformation in check, but it has also led to claims that companies use curation to impose their own political preferences on users.
Are Your Own Devices Inadvertently Spying on You?
Is it “Big Brother” or your phone that you should worry about? The constant assault on privacy seems unavoidable in this digital age. When you think of being spied on, it’s easy to think of the devices shared in “How to find out who’s spying on you.”
Yet as you educate yourself against some obvious culprits invading your privacy, it might be hard to imagine that one of the most invasive entities is a product you use daily: your smartphone, computer or tablet.
Part of the appeal of such an intelligent device is that the phone and the apps it hosts collect information on your preferences and behaviors to anticipate your needs and make your life easier. However, a slew of apps does not need access to certain functions of your device or data to perform as needed.
While manufacturers have made strides to help people identify when their cameras and microphones are being used, it is up to you to take the extra step to safeguard yourself. iPhones have indicators at the top right corner that notifies you with a green dot when the camera is being used and an orange dot when the microphone is being used.
Plane Wastewater Study Shows How COVID Travel Restrictions Failed
U.S. News & World Report reported:
Wastewater research isn’t for the squeamish, but it can get to the bottom of questions about such things as the effectiveness of COVID-19 air travel restrictions.
Tests of toilet tank water from flights entering the United Kingdom helped Welsh scientists determine that steps meant to keep the virus from traveling among countries appear to have failed.
For their study, the researchers tested the toilet tank water taken from long- and short-haul flights entering Britain at three airports — Heathrow, Edinburgh and Bristol — between March 8 and March 31, 2022. During those three weeks, almost all planes had SARS-CoV-2 in their wastewater samples. The virus was also found in wastewater at arrival terminals.
During the study period, on March 18, 2022, a requirement that unvaccinated passengers get tested for COVID before departure and two days after arrival was lifted. Researchers saw little difference in the wastewater before and after that date.
Japan to Lower COVID to Flu Status, Further Easing Rules
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Friday announced plans to downgrade the legal status of COVID-19 to the equivalent of seasonal influenza in the spring, a move that would further relax mask-wearing and other preventive measures as the country seeks to return to normalcy.
Kishida said he has instructed experts and government officials to discuss the details of lowering COVID-19′s status. A change would also remove self-isolation rules and other anti-virus requirements and allow COVID-19 patients to seek treatment at any hospital instead of only specialized facilities.
In Japan, COVID-19 is currently categorized as a Class 2 disease, along with SARS and tuberculosis, and is subject to restricting movements of patients and their close contacts, while allowing central and local governments to issue emergency measures. Downgrading it to Class 5 would mean scrapping those rules.