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Widely Available AI Could Have Deadly Consequences
In September 2021, scientists Sean Ekins and Fabio Urbina were working on an experiment they had named the “Dr. Evil project.” The Swiss government’s Spiez laboratory had asked them to find out what would happen if their artificial intelligence (AI) drug discovery platform, MegaSyn, fell into the wrong hands.
Ekins planned to outline the findings at the Spiez Convergence conference — a biennial meeting that brings experts together to discuss the potential security risks of the latest advances in chemistry and biology — in a presentation on how AI for drug discovery could be misused to create biochemical weapons. “For me, it was trying to see if the technology could do it,” Ekins says. “That was the curiosity factor.”
At the conference and then later in a three-page paper, Ekins and his colleagues issued a stark warning. “Without being overly alarmist, this should serve as a wake-up call for our colleagues in the ‘AI in drug discovery’ community,” Ekins and his colleagues wrote.
Mastercard Launches Tech That Lets You Pay With Your Face or Hand in Stores
Mastercard is piloting new technology that lets shoppers make payments with just their face or hand at the checkout point.
The company on Tuesday launched a program for retailers to offer biometric payment methods, like facial recognition and fingerprint scanning. At checkout, users will be able to authenticate their payment by showing their face or the palm of their hand instead of swiping their card.
The program has already gone live in five St Marche grocery stores in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Mastercard says it plans to roll it out globally later this year.
About 1.4 billion people are expected to use facial recognition technology to authenticate a payment by 2025, more than doubling from 671 million in 2020, according to a forecast from Juniper Research.
CDC to All Domestic Travelers: Test Close as Possible to Departure Time
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its guidance for people traveling within the United States.
The agency now urges all domestic travelers to “consider getting tested as close to the time of departure as possible (no more than three days) before your trip,” according to its COVID-19 website updates this month.
This advice notably includes travelers who are current with their vaccines and boosters. Previously, the recommendation to test before domestic travel applied to those who weren’t up-to-date with their COVID-19 vaccines.
There’s also testing guidance for after your trip is over, especially if you’ve been spending time in areas crowded with people. The CDC recommends taking a COVID-19 test after domestic travel “if your trip involved situations with greater risk of exposure such as being in crowded places while not wearing a well-fitting mask or respirator.”
COVID Cases Are Rising — But Cities So Far Aren’t Reimposing Mask Mandates
Rising COVID-19 cases across the country so far aren’t resulting in local mask mandates coming back, as officials in multiple Democratic-leaning cities said in recent days they have no plans to bring back COVID-19 restrictions even as they recommend people voluntarily mask up.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Monday the city is “not at the point of mandating masks” or other restrictions like requiring proof of vaccination, noting that hospitals are not overwhelmed even as the city approaches a “high” COVID-19 alert level.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu similarly said Monday the city so far wouldn’t change its protocols to require masks, but still recommends people wear them.
Some school districts have started reimposing mask mandates in recent weeks — even if their broader communities haven’t — including schools in New Jersey, Maine, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Hawaii.
Biden’s New Disinformation Board Comes Under Scrutiny
The Department of Homeland Security has established a new working group aimed at combating dangerous disinformation spread by foreign adversaries and criminal networks, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced last month.
News of the board’s creation sparked an uproar among Republican lawmakers and conservative media figures, many of whom accused the Biden administration of forming a “Ministry of Truth” akin to the government propaganda operation depicted in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”
Critics on the right say the Biden administration can’t be trusted to serve as arbiters of truth and worry that, though the board’s official mission may be narrow on paper, there’s nothing to stop it from becoming a tool to suppress conservatives’ free speech.
American Free Speech Enters Uncharted Territory
China censors police criticism of the country’s draconian COVID-19 policy. In Russia, referring to the country’s invasion of Ukraine as a war is a crime.
Those authoritarian realities seem a long way from the Wild West of American free speech, where people are protected under the law to criticize and besmirch public figures.
Just maybe not under Twitter’s content policy.
Self-described “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk‘s quest to turn Twitter into his vision of a marketplace of ideas — that would also be friendly to misinformation and whatever else people want to say — has hit an ironic snag over all the fake accounts on the platform. Musk says he’s put his bid to acquire Twitter on hold as he’s worried about fake accounts.
Children’s Activity Levels Have Not Recovered After End of COVID Restrictions — Study
Children have become more sedentary and their physical activity levels have deteriorated in the wake of the pandemic even after the lifting of restrictions, a study suggests.
Researchers said child physical activity levels fell below national guidelines during the COVID-19 crisis and did not recover when lockdowns ended. The study led by the University of Bristol found that by the end of 2021, only a third were meeting the national recommended physical activity guidelines.
The study also revealed a marked increase in sedentary time, with children spending 25 minutes longer sitting down each day during the week than previously.
Students Protest, Discontent Grows Over China’s COVID Policy
Administrators at an elite Beijing University have backed down from plans to further tighten pandemic restrictions on students as part of China’s “zero-COVID” strategy after a weekend protest at the school, according to students Tuesday.
Graduate students at Peking University staged the rare, but peaceful protest Sunday over the school’s decision to erect a sheet-metal wall to keep them further sequestered on campus, while allowing faculty to come and go freely. Discontent had already been simmering over regulations prohibiting them from ordering in food or having visitors, and daily COVID-19 testing.
A citywide lockdown of Shanghai and expanded restrictions in Beijing in recent weeks have raised questions about the economic and human costs of China’s strict virus controls, which the ruling Communist Party has trumpeted as a success compared to other major nations with much higher death tolls.
Inside Wuhan’s Lockdown: This Author Is Telling Stories From China’s ‘Deadly Quiet City’ in the Early Days of COVID
It was April 2020, and the celebrated Chinese writer Murong Xuecun could enter — but not leave — the city that became synonymous with the origin of COVID-19.
The writer, once a regular New York Times opinion contributor, decided to make the trip to document what was happening in Wuhan as COVID-19 emerged. He believed, he says, that the government would try to hide the truth.
Two years later, Murong has released “Deadly Quiet City,” an in-depth and personal account of the grief and sorrow Wuhan residents endured that also paints a picture of the corruption and ruthlessness employed by government officials desperate to appear in control of the outbreak.
People “died silently,” he writes in the book’s foreword.
Snapchat’s Stricter Policies for Anonymous Apps and Friend Finders Aren’t yet Fully Enforced
A small handful of Snap Kit platform developers have not yet complied with the new guidelines around anonymous messaging and friend-finding apps announced in March. The Snapchat maker revamped its developer platform policies on March 17, 2022, to ban anonymous apps and require developers to build friend-finding apps to limit access to users 18 or older.
The policy changes were effective immediately and existing developers were given 30 days to come into compliance — a date that would have passed last month. It is now mid-May and some developers of the newly banned and restricted apps are not yet meeting Snap’s new requirements, we’ve found.
For example, one of the apps offered an extension is Sendit, the anonymous Q&A app that surged to the top of the App Store last year after Snap suspended other top anonymous Q&A apps, YOLO and LMK. Those latter two apps had been banned from Snap’s platform after the company was sued by a mother of a teen who died by suicide after being bullied via those tools.
This year, Snap was named in a second lawsuit, alongside Meta, related to an alleged lack of safeguards across social media platforms which a mother says contributed to her 11-year-old’s suicide.
Google Taps FDA’s Former Digital Health Chief for Global Strategy Role
Google has hired the former head of digital health at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to lead its efforts to develop and commercialize artificial intelligence products to improve the delivery of medical services around the world.
Bakul Patel, a 13-year veteran of the FDA, will serve as Google’s senior director for global digital health strategy and regulatory affairs, according to a statement posted on his LinkedIn page Monday. He left his job at the agency last month.
