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Mask Mandate Update: Full List of States With Some Restrictions in Place
New mask mandates have been imposed in healthcare facilities and other places in at least three states in recent days. While it doesn’t seem that widespread mask mandates will make a return, some businesses, schools and hospitals have temporarily required masks in response to reported COVID-19 cases in recent weeks.
Officials in three Bay Area counties — Contra Costa, Sonoma and San Mateo — announced that staff in healthcare facilities will be required to wear masks. The order will remain in effect through April 30.
The Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center announced that all staff will be required to wear masks on the premises beginning September 25.
Windsor Terrace Middle School in New York City’s Brooklyn borough has temporarily reinstated a mask mandate. The measure was prompted by a spike in cases among sixth-grade students at the school, Chalkbeat reported.
UN Deadlocked Over Regulating AI
If you think the U.S. Congress is moving slowly on AI regulation, you’ll be waiting much longer for a global AI regulator or treaty.
The big picture: That’s the message out of the UN General Assembly in New York this week, as political leaders, tech companies and civil society gather to debate global challenges. Why it matters: A plurality of AI experts surveyed by Axios support global guardrails for AI.
But in the absence of UN leadership, no organization has asserted authority over the AI safety debates led by groups ranging from the G-7 to the World Economic Forum and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Driving the news: The leaders of four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council skipped this week’s debate — only Biden showed up.
A downbeat UN Secretary-General António Guterres this week called for “some global entity” with AI monitoring and regulatory capacity and warned that “governments alone will not be able to tame” AI. But in a CNN interview, he admitted the UN “has no power at all” to bring superpowers together and warned that the world is headed towards a “great fracture.”
Your Face Belongs to Us by Kashmir Hill Review — Nowhere to Hide
In the past few years powerful “machine learning” and cloud computing, allied to the growth of smartphones, selfies and social media, have made a facial recognition system able to identify anyone as inevitable as the atomic bomb after the splitting of the uranium atom in 1938.
Just as that breakthrough led to a cascade with an obvious endpoint, so the preconditions for facial recognition — masses of pictures online and rapidly improving algorithms for determining what makes a face unique — have been there waiting for whoever was willing to ignore the socially controversial effects.
Overall, the problem is that we can’t figure out if pervasive, immediate facial recognition is a good or bad thing. Might it find kidnapped children? Hit-and-run drivers? Burglars? Save us embarrassment at social occasions? Certainly. Would it be abused by people looking to harm and harass, and by governments and police in authoritarian or democratic states?
Again, certainly. More importantly, can it be stopped? It’s hard to see how, and the New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill, author of Your Face Belongs to Us: The Secretive Startup Dismantling Your Privacy — not unreasonably — doesn’t offer any suggestions. The bomb is out of the bay. The question now is where it lands.
DeSantis Says He Won’t Support COVID Vaccine Funding if Elected President
Ron DeSantis on Wednesday said if elected president, he would not pay for further coronavirus vaccines for Americans.
“Certainly, we’re not going to fund them,” the Florida Republican governor said during a wide-ranging interview with ABC News recorded Wednesday from Midland, Texas, where he announced his domestic energy policy.
The comment comes as DeSantis has ramped up his attacks in recent weeks on former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, over his administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a presidential candidate, DeSantis has regularly warned that mandates and restrictions would return if the government is given the opportunity.
As some limited, local mask mandates have returned, DeSantis held a roundtable last week on the new COVID-19 shots from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, where his surgeon general recommended people under 65 against receiving them.
The EU’s Quest to Fix the Internet Could Become a Privacy and Security Nightmare
The European Union is notorious for its commitment to regulate the internet, either for better or worse. The GDPR has been echoed by nations worldwide as the blueprint for protecting citizens’ digital privacy.
From August 25, the Digital Market Act and Digital Service Act have introduced new obligations for digital services. At the same time, the Chat Control proposal is gathering a lot of criticism for its attack on encryption in the name of online safety.
Among these highly-debated legislations, one proposal may have flown under the radar: the revision of the EU’s digital identity law (eIDAS). A process started in October 2020 and is currently under trialogue negotiations as lawmakers seek to “fix” web security among country members. However, experts warn of unintended consequences like greater surveillance, censorship, and false security instead.
Australia to Hold Independent Inquiry Into Handling of COVID Pandemic
Australia’s center-left Labor government on Thursday said it would hold an independent inquiry into the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic to better prepare for future health crises.
Australia closed its international borders and locked down cities among other pandemic restrictions that helped keep infections and deaths far below levels in other comparable developed economies such as the United States and Britain.
A three-member panel, which includes an epidemiologist, public service expert and economist, will conduct the inquiry, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told a media conference.
The opposition also criticized Albanese’s government for excluding from the inquiry state-level restrictions, such as the stop-start lockdowns by the Victoria government of Melbourne, which endured a total of 262 days in lockdown, one of the longest in the world.
