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Unvaccinated J.T. Realmuto on Missing Toronto Games: ‘Not Going to Let Canada Tell Me What I Do’ With Body
Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto refuses to be swayed to get vaccinated against COVID-19 amid news he’ll miss Philadelphia’s two-game series in Toronto this week.
“I’m a healthy 31-year-old professional athlete,” Realmuto said Monday after the Phillies’ 6-1 loss to the Cardinals, per the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I’m not going to let Canada tell me what I do and don’t put in my body.”
Players who are not vaccinated against COVID-19 will be unable to enter Canada to play games against the Blue Jays due to the country’s restrictions. Additionally, players will not be paid for those games, as part of the MLB’s new collective bargaining agreement. Realmuto will reportedly lose about $262,000 for missing the series, which he called “a little bit of money.”
Third baseman Alec Bohm reportedly said it was a “personal choice” as his reason for not getting a vaccination while starting pitcher Kyle Gibson cited a medical condition. Starting pitcher Aaron Nola said he “didn’t want to do it.”
Return of Mask Mandate Appears Imminent in LA County. Here’s What to Expect.
Los Angeles County is on track to enter the “high” COVID-19 community level as soon as Thursday, in which case an indoor mask mandate would return two weeks later, the public health director said Tuesday.
If the county continues at its current pace, masks could be mandated indoors again by July 29.
Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer told the Board of Supervisors she expects the county to move into the “high” activity category within days.
A mandatory indoor mask mandate will be imposed if the county remains in the “high” category for two consecutive weeks — which, under the current pace, means the mandate will take effect by July 29.
Meta Has a New AI Tool to Fight Misinformation — and It’s Using Wikipedia to Train Itself
Facebook says it wants to help fix misinformation running rampant across the internet — a problem it may have helped create in the first place.
Facebook parent Meta announced a new AI-powered tool on Monday, called Sphere. It’s intended to help detect and address misinformation, or “fake news,” on the internet.
Meta claims that it’s “the first [AI] model capable of automatically scanning hundreds of thousands of citations at once to check whether they truly support the corresponding claims.”
Twitter Sues Elon Musk to Force Him to Go Through With $44B Deal
Twitter has made good on its warning to sue Elon Musk for trying to back out of his $44 billion offer to purchase the social media platform. The company filed its lawsuit against the billionaire Tesla CEO Tuesday in Chancery Court in Delaware.
Musk tweeted, “Oh the irony lol,” after news of the lawsuit broke.
The world’s richest man responded to Twitter’s board of directors’ warnings with a tweet showing him laughing at the notion that the company, where some opposed his acquisition, is now willing to go to court to make him buy it.
In a Post-Roe World, the Future of Digital Privacy Looks Even Grimmer
Welcome to the post-Roe era of digital privacy, a moment that underscores how the use of technology has made it practically impossible for Americans to evade ubiquitous tracking.
In states that have banned abortion, some women seeking out-of-state options to terminate pregnancies may end up following a long list of steps to try to shirk surveillance — like connecting to the internet through an encrypted tunnel and using burner email addresses — and reduce the likelihood of prosecution.
Even so, they could still be tracked. Law enforcement agencies can obtain court orders for access to detailed information, including location data logged by phone networks. And many police departments have their own surveillance technologies, like license plate readers.
In other words, the state of digital privacy is already so far gone that forgoing the use of digital tools altogether may be the only way to keep information secure, security researchers said. Leaving mobile phones at home would help evade the persistent location tracking deployed by wireless carriers.
U.S. Announces New Tech Partnership With Israel to Study AI, Address Climate Change
President Biden on Wednesday announced a new technological partnership with Israel focused on addressing climate change, studying artificial intelligence and countering the COVID-19 pandemic.
The White House released a statement saying the new strategic tech partnership will involve interagency dialogue between the U.S. and Israel and that officials will meet annually, with the first meeting set to take place in the fall of this year.
They plan to study the emerging field of AI through the fields of transportation, medicine and agriculture.
Shanghai Fears New Lockdown as Millions Test for COVID Amid Sweltering Heat
Millions of Shanghai residents braved sweltering heat Tuesday to wait in line for compulsory COVID tests, as growing case numbers and the emergence of a highly infectious Omicron subvariant spurred new fears of a return to mass lockdown.
Shanghai authorities have ordered the majority of the city’s 16 districts to undergo two rounds of testing from Tuesday to Thursday, after a case of the new BA.5.2.1 subvariant was detected in the community on July 8.
The highly transmissible BA.5 variant is spreading rapidly worldwide and is seen as a great threat by authorities in China — the last major country adhering to a stringent zero-COVID strategy.
This Part of India Is on the Verge of Becoming a Complete Surveillance State
The Indian government’s obsession with surveillance is nothing new. In 2021, the Pegasus Project, an investigation by a consortium of international journalists, revealed that the Indian government had been spying on more than 300 people, including journalists, activists and politicians.
Telangana is the youngest state in India. It was carved out as a separate political entity in June 2014 from Andhra Pradesh. As a young state, Telangana has been eager to experiment with the use of technology. Its capital city, Hyderabad, is one of the main technology hubs in India.
Srinivas Kodali, a researcher with the advocacy organization Free Software Movement of India, said the Telangana government has been open to allowing big technology companies to test their software there. According to Kodali, the bureaucracy in Hyderabad touts its innovation while implementing surveillance without any oversight.
TikTok to Roll out ‘Content Levels’ Rating System to Protect Teens
TikTok is the wild west of social media feeds (and they’re all kinds of a wild west). A scroll could start on a dance trend, jump to a clip of raw chicken ‘marinating’ in NyQuil and end on a video of someone filing their own teeth. It’s weird out there, and occasionally dangerous. Now TikTok is taking its next steps to rein things in.
The company announced a rating system called “Content Levels,” that it plans to institute an early version of “in the coming weeks,” in a Wednesday blog post. TikTok had indicated back in February that it was moving towards age-based feed restrictions, and Content Levels offers the first details of what that might look like. App users will also now have more control over their own video streams, with the ability to selectively mute hashtags.
TikTok has had a meteoric rise, especially among teenagers and even younger children. In the first three months of 2022, it was the most downloaded app worldwide. Throughout its rocket journey to the top though, TikTok has faced lots of flack — both for its controversial and allegedly flawed privacy policies and for its impact on users.
A Ransomware Attack on a Debt Collection Firm Could Be One of 2022’s Biggest Health Data Breaches
A ransomware attack on a little-known debt collection firm that serves hundreds of hospitals and medical facilities across the U.S. could be one of the biggest data breaches of personal and health information this year.
The Colorado-based Professional Finance Company, known as PFC, which contracts with “thousands” of organizations to process customer and patient unpaid bills and outstanding balances, disclosed on July 1 that it had been hit by ransomware months earlier in February.
PFC said in its data breach notice that more than 650 healthcare providers are affected by its ransomware attack, adding that the attackers took patient names, addresses, their outstanding balance and information relating to their accounts. PFC said that in “some cases” dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and health insurance and medical treatment information were also taken by the attackers.
In a separate filing with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, PFC confirmed that over 1.91 million patients are affected by the cyberattack.
Amazon Gave Ring Videos to Police Without Owners’ Permission
Amazon handed Ring video doorbell footage to police without owners’ permission at least 11 times so far this year — a figure that highlights the unfettered access the company is giving police to doorsteps across the country.
The revelation came in a letter Amazon sent to Sen.Ed Markey (D-Mass.) on July 1 after the lawmaker questioned the video doorbell’s surveillance practices in June. Markey released the letter to the public on Wednesday.
It’s a data point that is likely to only heighten Congressional scrutiny of the tech giant, which lawmakers have already upbraided over its privacy practices, after its facial recognition service Rekognition falsely associated 28 members of Congress with criminal mugshots in 2018 and how its Echo Dot Kids Edition protected children’s privacy.
The company is also facing antitrust concerns over its dominance across online retail, and its treatment of the third-party sellers that use its platform.
