The lawsuit sees Snowden accused of failing to submit the manuscript for review, so government agencies could confirm it doesn’t contain any confidential information. Interestingly, the justice department is not seeking to ban the distribution of the book – instead, it only wants to seize all profits made from its sales. In a release by DoJ, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, G. Zachary Terwilliger, said intelligence information should protect the nation and not provide personal monetary benefits: In the book, Snowden describes the life that led him to reveal the US government tactics that allegedly endangered the privacy of people....

The expansive proposals range from breaking up different businesses run by big tech, to more effectively preventing mergers known as “killer acquisitions”, in which big tech companies buy up rivals to stamp out threats to their market power. The proposals would represent a massive change to US antitrust laws. US courts applying these laws currently tend to favor the growth of large companies and regard their economic power as a sign of superior economic efficiency....

Starting at €3,290 (~$3,617), it’s a really pricey folding bike, but it does a lot to justify its price. The Vello Bike+ is super lightweight for an ebike at 14kg (31 lb). It has a unique folding mechanism that contorts the bike into a smaller footprint than anything I’ve used other than the Brompton. It uses a fancy Gates Carbon belt and other high-quality components. And the bike is highly customizable, with a wealth of custom accessories and solid cargo capabilities thanks to optional front and rear racks....

According to the report the bank‘s investigation follows a request by Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PSDV) – the country’s state-owned oil and natural gas company – which is apparently looking to send Bitcoin and Ethereum to the central bank. The institution would then use the cryptocurrency to pay the oil company’s suppliers. It’s not known how PSDV came to own Bitcoin and Ethereum, or the value of its holdings, but it’s not hard to see why it would want to avoid selling its coins on the open market....

The idea that the approaching spring may stem the spread of the disease comes largely from a comparison with the flu. In many ways COVID-19 is like the flu – both spread in similar ways (respiratory secretions and contaminated surfaces) and both cause typically mild respiratory diseases that can develop into life-threatening pneumonia. But the transmissibility and severity of COVID-19 are much greater than the flu. And it isn’t clear if COVID-19 transmission will be affected by seasonal temperature variation....

Who woulda thought a little TV show from South Korea would be the hottest program throughout the English-speaking world? Sprinkle a little Hunger Games over Southeast Asia and you’ve got Squid Game, the worldwide smash that has the planet talking. And the way you really know how ginormous a program it is can be summed up in one simple fact: the number of people interested in learning Korean is up 76 percent in the UK, and 40 percent in the U....

The 1.8 kg robot climbed three meters above Mars, hovered in the air for about 30 seconds, and then returned to the red planet’s surface. It was only a brief trip, but Ingenuity had to overcome some major challenges on the way. The Martian atmosphere is just 1% as dense as that of the surface of our planet, which means there’s little air for the chopper’s 1.2-meter-wide rotor blades to push against....

Until now! The videos also show just how capable the R1T is at tackling steep inclines and declines on loose gravel. Check them out below. — RJ Scaringe (@RJScaringe) January 31, 2021 [Read: How Polestar is using blockchain to increase transparency] — RJ Scaringe (@RJScaringe) February 11, 2021 — RJ Scaringe (@RJScaringe) February 13, 2021 Going by when and where these videos appear to have been posted from, it seems Scaringe and his crew took the vehicles out east of LA, eventually to Arizona....

I’d like to turn our attention to social media, a powerful technology that, when used inappropriately, can facilitate acts of terrorism like this, and when used appropriately, can prevent (or mitigate) them. Obviously, mass shootings are the result of a myriad of interconnected factors, not the least of which includes the easy accessibility of firearms in the United States. But we owe it to ourselves and the people around us to examine all these factors, and take action on what we can....

Web 3.0 aims to build a new scalable economy where transactions are powered by blockchain technology, eschewing the need for a central intermediary or platform. And in the mobility space, there are lots of things happening. Um, but how does Web 3.0 relate to mobility? Over the next few weeks, I’m taking a look at a bunch of startups that are integrating mobility and the potential of Web 3.0 into their product offerings in interesting ways....

In the most general sense, an algorithm is a series of instructions telling a computer how to transform a set of facts about the world into useful information. The facts are data, and the useful information is knowledge for people, instructions for machines or input for yet another algorithm. There are many common examples of algorithms, from sorting sets of numbers to finding routes through maps to displaying information on a screen....

The algorithm in question was GoogLeNet, a convolutional neural network architecture that won the 2014 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC 2014). The right image is an “adversarial example.” It has undergone subtle manipulations that go unnoticed to the human eye while making it a totally different sight to the digital eye of a machine learning algorithm. Adversarial examples exploit the way artificial intelligence algorithms work to disrupt the behavior of artificial intelligence algorithms....

Ex-Meta employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen said last month Instagram was “more dangerous than other forms of social media.” All of this led to lawmakers being concerned about the social media firm’s lack of actions to protect kids online. In October, Senator Richard Blumenthal had called for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify on the issue, but said Mosseri could appear instead. Here are the six major talking points about the hearing, and why you should care about all this....

Last week, geolocation startup What3words and mapping conglomerate HERE, which is majority owned by BMW, Daimler, and Audi, announced a partnership that will see What3words integrated into a whole host of in-vehicle satellite navigation systems. Don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of HERE, it’s an OEM supplier, so unless you’re in the industry you’re unlikely to have heard of it. That said, HERE provides the navigation technology for some 150 million cars currently on the roads, and four in five new cars sold with embedded maps use its tech....

So, what’s the answer? What criteria should be used to determine the “end” of Covid’s pandemic phase? These are deceptively simple questions and there are no easy answers. I am a computer scientist who investigates the development of ontologies. In computing, ontologies are a means to formally structure knowledge of a subject domain, with its entities, relations, and constraints, so that a computer can process it in various applications and help humans to be more precise....

That averages out to 18 people a day — and a deadly 4.5% increase from 2019. To make matters worse, the burden is not shared equally among pedestrians. Low-income residents, older adults, and people of color are more likely to be struck and killed while walking. Black pedestrians are twice as likely to be killed than white, non-Hispanic pedestrians. Native Americans faced risks nearly three times as great. Sadly, these statistics may underestimate the toll, as hundreds of traffic fatalities are reported without race each year....

Today’s actually an off day for the product. Typically, if you take a gander at the “LGBTQ+” topic in Google News you’ll find that about 90% of the stories surfaced by the platform’s algorithms are negative. But today is “Coming Out Day,” so there’s a handful of non-negative pieces in the feed right now taking up slots that are typically filled with negative ones. As of the time of this article’s publishing, the stories that surface in the LGBTQ+ topic break down as follows:...

— Christina “I Am Sadly not at WWDC” Warren (@film_girl) June 4, 2019 Bash has been the primary macOS shell since OS X 10.2 Jaguar. For almost sixteen years, MacOS developers have used it to write scripts and issue commands to the underlying operating system. It’s deeply ingrained in how developers work. So, why the sudden change? In a word: licensing. For well over a decade, Apple has shipped macOS with a horrendously outdated version of GNU Bash....

Was it an army of white-collar workers hurling their monitors out the window, tearing up contracts and trashing their swivel chairs? Because the reality is a little less cinematic. People are burned out, miserable, and racking up more hours than ever before. For many, resigning was their last resort. The Great Resignation concept gets some things right, and many things wrong. Workers are quitting in high numbers, but they’re not all leaving their jobs for the same reason....

The King of the Monsters’ incredible evolution in fiction is, arguably, due to real-world global anxiety over increasing nationalism and the US military’s continued nuclear aggression. Yeah, that old chestnut. The research argues that Godzilla’s appearance changes, while surely attributable to the various film companies and personnel who’ve worked on the movies over the decades, are due to spikes in “humanity’s collective anxiety.” In other words: the worse humanity becomes in real-life, the bigger Godzilla gets....