Apple Working to Remove Non-Inclusive Terms Across its Eco-System – Enter21st

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In mild of an industry-wide shift away from racially-insensitive terminology, Apple has introduced that it, too, is working to exchange non-inclusive language throughout its developer ecosystem. The adjustments will probably be carried out inside Xcode, platform APIs, documentation and open supply initiatives, the corporate mentioned.

These changes began on June 22 with the beta software and developer documentation released at WWDC20. (We are) moving to terms such as allow list and deny list, and main as the default SCM branch in Xcode 12, the corporate wrote in a weblog publish on Thursday. Developer APIs with exclusionary phrases may even be eliminated. The firm says it plans to introduce replacements throughout inside codebases and public APIs. It may even be relevant to open supply initiatives, akin to WebKit and Swift.

Apples announcement follows an identical choice from fellow Silicon Valley tech behemoth, Google. The search large, final month, introduced plans to drop gender-insensitive and racially-demeaning phrases from its codebase. According to the corporates code model information, its going to change phrases akin to blacklist and whitelist with blocklist and allowlist.

Meanwhile, Linus Torvalds has additionally introduced his choice to abolish phrases like master/slave within the Linux kernel. The group has reportedly formulated a brand new coverage that goals to exchange racially insensitive terminologies with impartial options.

The developments come within the wake of widespread protests in opposition to racism and police brutality within the US. Ever for the reason that protests in opposition to police brutality within the US broke out after the killing of George Floyd, a number of corporations together with Google, Twitter, GitHub have taken steps to make the event neighborhood extra racially-inclusive and gender-neutral.

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TD-LTE Ecosystem Market Evenly Poised To Reach A Market Value Of US$ By 2015 2021 – Jewish Life News

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According to the latest report published by PMR, the TD-LTE Ecosystem market is anticipated to grow at a steady pace over the forecast period (2019-2029). The report sheds light on the various trends and restraining factors that are expected to shape the growth of the TD-LTE Ecosystem in the upcoming years. The report ponders over the various parameters that are expected to impact revenue generation, sales, and demand for the TD-LTE Ecosystem in the various regional markets.

According to the study, the TD-LTE Ecosystem market is likely to attain a market value of ~US$ XX by 2019 and grow at a CAGR of ~XX% during the assessment period. The market study introspects the competition landscape of the TD-LTE Ecosystem market and highlights the key developments and technological innovations witnessed in the current TD-LTE Ecosystem market landscape.

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TD-LTE Ecosystem Market Evenly Poised To Reach A Market Value Of US$ By 2015 2021 - Jewish Life News

Explained: Why annual floods are essential for survival of Kaziranga National Park – The Indian Express

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Written by Tora Agarwala, Edited by Explained Desk | Guwahati | Updated: July 19, 2020 8:28:41 am A one-horned rhinoceros along with her baby stands in floodwater inside Kaziranga National Park, in Golaghat district, Thursday, July 16, 2020. (PTI Photo)

As a fresh wave of floods ravages Assam, killing 73 and affecting nearly 40 lakh people across the state, 85 per cent of the Kaziranga National Park and Tiger Reserve (KNPTR) remains submerged. On Thursday, Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal visited the park to take stock of the situation. So far, 125 animals have been rescued and 86 have died, including rhinos, deer and wild boar, in the sixth worst flood since 1988.

Yet, the annual deluge is considered essential for the survival of the UNESCO World Heritage Site. We explain the role of floods in Kazirangas ecosystem, how increasing high floods can become a problem, and what can be done to keep it in check.

Assam is traditionally flood prone, and the 1,055 sq km KNPTR sandwiched between the Brahmaputra river and the Karbi Anglong Hills is no exception. Among experts there is a consensus that floods are necessary for Kaziranga by virtue of its ecosystem. It is a riverine ecosystem, not a solid landmass-based ecosystem, said P Sivakumar, Director, KNPTR, The system wont survive without water. The entire area of Kaziranga formed by alluvial deposits from the Brahmaputra and its tributaries is centred around the river.

According to Uttam Saikia, Honorary Wildlife Warden of Kaziranga, this floodplain eco system has not only been created by floods but also feeds off it.

The regenerative nature of floods helps replenish Kazirangas water bodies and maintain its landscape, a mix of wetlands, grasslands and semi-evergreen deciduous forests. Saikia said the floodwaters also function as a breeding ground for fish. The same fish are carried away by the receding waters into the Brahmaputra in a way, the park replenishes the rivers stock of fish too, he said.

The waters also help get rid of unwanted plants such as water hyacinth which collect in huge masses in the landscape. In a herbivore-dominated area like Kaziranga, it is important we maintain its grassland status. If it were not for the annual floods, the area would become a woodland, said Sivakumar.

Many also believe that floods are a way of natural selection. A number of animals especially the old, weak cannot survive the floods. Only the ones with superior genes survive, said Rabindra Sarma, Wildlife Research Officer at KNPTR since 1998.

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Earlier, a big flood would come once in ten years, said Rathin Barman, who heads the Centre for Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation (CWRC), which takes in injured and orphaned wild animals of the park. Now, they happen every other year, he said, adding that massive deforestation in catchment areas or release of waters by dams upstream may be contributory factors. Climate change models, too, predict that floods will become increasingly devastating with each year.

Barring 2018, the years between 2016 and 2020 have all featured high floods (or floods which submerge more than 60 per cent of the park) killing and injuring hundreds of animals.

Animals adapt naturally to floods but when the waters hit a certain level, they gravitate towards safer, higher ground in the Karbi Anglong hills.

In pictures | Lakhs displaced in Assam floods, national parks hit

While in the past, Kaziranga and Karbi Anglong were part of the same landscape, the animals now have to cross the bustling National Highway 37 which cuts across the park. Over the years, the highway is getting increasingly tough to cross. A few of the nine wildlife corridors on the highway Panbari, Haldibari, Bagori, Harmati, Kanchanjuri, Hatidandi, Deosur, Chirang and Amguri are choked by traffic, said Dr Naveen Pandey, Deputy Director and Veterinary Advisor, The Corbett Foundation, Kaziranga. Mushrooming of hotels, restaurants, shops, and ancillary structures of the tea industry has not helped either.

As a result, animals that venture out of the park, die either under the wheels of speeding vehicles on the highway, or are killed by poachers who take advantage of their vulnerability. In recent years, due to vigilant patrolling, these numbers have decreased. Those that remain in the park often young or the very old die by drowning, entangled in the debris under water as they try to swim.

According to Dr Varun Goswami, Senior Scientist at Conservation Initiatives, an Assam-based organisation that works in the Kaziranga landscape, wildlife in KNPTR have adapted to the natural flood regime by finding refuge on higher ground south of the park. If their safe passage is not ensured, major floods can cause serious losses.

This year four rhinos as well as a number of boar and deer have drowned, and 14 hog deer have died in road accidents so far. The authorities will be able to ascertain the actual number of deaths only once the waters recede.

As per Sarma, at least 25 out of 75 fringe villages on the southern periphery of the park are affected by the floods. Fleeing floodwaters, animals stray from the boundary of the park, and there is an increased interaction between humans and wildlife, at times leading to conflict. Rhino calves get separated from their mothers, tigers swim and take refuge inside homes, deer amble into villages, said Sarma. Even so, most villagers, along with the frontline staff of the forest department and other organisations such as Wildlife Trust of Indias CWRC, are part of the tough rescue operations during the floods guiding strayed animals to safer ground, treating those injured and generally keeping a strict vigil round the clock.

Also read | Through rain and floods, Assams community workers battle pandemic

Preparedness begins a month before floods hit. The authorities keep a track of updates from the Central Water Commission, and monitor water levels of the Brahmaputra tributaries upstream in Arunachal Pradesh.

According to Dr Pandey, the civil administration, park authority, NGOs, and local communities work together to tackle the floods. To avoid disease outbreaks, a door-to-door vaccination is organised every year pre-floods, he said, Thereafter, camps are organised to create awareness against poaching and harming wild animals that are rendered vulnerable during the floods.

Moreover, when the floods hit, Section 144 is imposed along NH-37, speed limits are enforced and fines levied. Barricades are also placed to help animals cross over to Karbi Anglong. The efforts of the forest departments frontline staff become crucial during the season.

Over the years, another mitigation measure has been artificial highlands (111 in the Nineties, 33 in 2016-17) built inside the park for wild animals to take refuge in during the flood.

While these highlands have helped a fair bit in reducing the number of animal casualties during floods, some feel that it is not a permanent solution.

Animals do take refuge there especially rhino and swamp deer but it is not viable to build more highlands since such constructions will ruin the natural ecosystem, said Sarma, terming the highlands a temporary refuge. These 33 highlands cannot accommodate all animals of Kaziranga, and the older ones are more or less dilapidated, he said.

Editorial | Assams flood problem cannot be entirely blamed on vagaries of nature. It needs to jettison outmoded flood control measures

According to Honorary Wildlife Warden Saikia, some animals do not take to the highlands naturally. They have been migrating to natural highlands of Karbi Anglong for centuries; suddenly these artificial constructions do not inspire confidence, they do not find it secure, he said.

Experts believe that emphasis needs to be put on securing animal corridors and ensuring a safe passage to the Karbi hills.

To that end, a 35-km-long flyover constructed over NH-37 was proposed by the Centre in September 2019.

While this flyover will help, 35 km is a lengthy stretch and might take time to build, said Sivakumar, So the focus should be on doing it quickly, using modern technology that will cause minimal disturbance to the animals during construction.

In April 2019, the Supreme Court banned all types of mining and related activities along the parks southern boundary and in the entire catchment area of the rivers that originate in the Karbi Anglong hill ranges and flow into Kaziranga, as well as new construction activities in private lands on nine animal corridors.

Apart from facilitating safe and unhindered wildlife movement, Dr. Goswami of Conservation Initiatives recommends the need for a landscape-scale conservation approach that recognises the value of the Karbi Anglong hills to the south. Kaziranga, with its rich grassland habitats has a primary role to play in supporting these wildlife populations, but the highlands of Karbi Anglong, where these animals take refuge, are the lifeline of the park during the floods, he said.

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Jeremy Clarkson has been getting to grips with wilding on his farm – Sunday Times Driving

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JEREMY Clarkson has spent a hefty portion of his life traversing the globe in some of the most gas-guzzling machines ever made. If you were to calculate his carbon footprint, you can imagine it would be more bigfoot than ballerina.

This must have been weighing on his mind of late, because he has dedicated sizeable portions of his time (and you would imagine, money) doing things that benefit the environment.

A couple of weeks ago he wrote in The Sunday Times Magazine about his attempts to improve the health of the forest that forms part of his farm, and last week he wrote about his noble goal tosave the rapidly declining population of bees, by purchasing a quarter of a million of them and encouraging them to pollinate.

This week, hes gone a step further and created an entirely new ecosystem. Its his contribution to what is becoming a global environmental movement: wilding.

When a tree falls over you leave it there for the beetles, he instructs. When an animal dies you put a clothes peg on your nose and wait for the body to be devoured by birds. And you learn to love thistles and brambles and nettles to such an extent that you will sell your lawnmower for scrap. It is now considered to be the tool of the Luddite.

Various human attempts at meddling with ecosystems have had, to put it mildly, mixed results. Clarkson notes an attempt in the 1940s by the Argentinian government to introduce beavers to Tierra Del Fuego, an archipelago at the southern end of the South American continent. The ambition of the government was to environmentally enrich the Patagonian province, as well as to provide fodder for a potential fur industry.

What happened was that the ten pairs of beavers flown in from Canada bred like a similarly buck-toothed animal, and before the government knew it, a plague of more than 100,000 beavers had run riot and all but destroyed the woodland area. There is now a widespread effort to eradicate the beavers, Clarkson says, with some guides bringing tourists to the island to hunt and eat the animals. The beavers effect on Tierra Del Fuego has been classified by experts as the biggest change to a subantarctic forest since the last ice age.

Weve seen this sort of thing before, notes The Grand Tour presenter. When America created Yellowstone National Park, experts reckoned that visitors would not want to be eaten. So it was decided to get rid of the wolves. But with no wolves, elks flourished to such an extent that all the aspen and willow trees were eaten, and the effects of that wiped out countless other species, including the beaver.

With all this at the back of his mind, Clarkson set about trying to create a bog on Diddly Squat farm. However, as weve come to realise over the course of his farming columns in The Sunday Times Magazine, the government keeps a hawk-like eye on everything farmers do, and therefore you need permission from a man in a Vauxhall all government officials have Vauxhalls if you want to change the bank, dredge, build a culvert, change a mooring, build a dam, create a weir, take a fish or park a boat.

After a mouse-related hiccup, however, Clarkson got the all clear and proceeded, as has been the case in many of his farming escapades, to get hold of a big piece of machinery and go to town. Fairly soon, the whole area look[ed] like Sam Mendes was filming a sequel to 1917 1918, perhaps.

Due to his incapability in operating the digger, the ecosystem that he finally created could be more accurately classified as a pond than a bog. The hole Id dug was deeper than an Australian uranium mine, and that meant the earth bank that was being erected from the spoil was larger than the Three Gorges Dam in China. It certainly wasnt what the man in the Vauxhall had given me permission to create.

However, a pond is still an ecosystem, and after Clarkson introduced some reeds, bulrushes and trouts to the party, life began to appear. Since he created the pond, he has spotted otters, herons and cormorants, and while the various interventions hes had to make mean that the scene doesnt feel wild, as such, hes fairly happy with the results.

To read more about Clarksons attempt at wilding, grab a copy of this weeks Sunday Times Magazineor read it online at The Sunday Times website.

Jeremy Clarkson has bought 250,000 bees

Jeremy Clarkson kills some trees to save a forest

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Fate/Grand Order Celebrates 5th Anniversary with Weekly Shonen Magazine – Anime News Network

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Takashi Takeuchi draws poster for 34th issue, Scthach gets original manga story

The Fate/Grand Order Fes. 2020 event might be canceled due to COVID-19, but the popular smartphone game is celebrating its 5th anniversary with five new projects in collaboration with Kodansha's Weekly Shonen Magazine, as follows:

Aniplex released the Fate/Grand Order smartphone game in Japan in summer 2015. The game received an English release in the United States and Canada in June 2017.

The game has inspired various anime adaptations. Fate/Grand Order Shinsei Entaku Ryiki Camelot: Wandering: Agateram, the first film in a two-part project, will open on August 15. The game is also inspiring the upcoming Fate/Grand Order Final Singularity - Grand Temple of Time: Solomon (Fate/Grand Order -Kyshoku Tokuiten Kani Jikan Shinden Solomon-) anime.

Sources: Weekly Shonen Magazine, Comic Natalie

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Fate/Grand Order Celebrates 5th Anniversary with Weekly Shonen Magazine - Anime News Network

The Advancements in Real World Artificial Intelligence – Analytics Insight

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When you pick up a magazine, scroll through the tech blogs, or simply chat with your peers about technology, youll quickly notice that almost everything related to the technology world seems to have some element of artificial intelligence or machine learning to it. Computer power is developing, calculations and Artificial Intelligence (AI) models are getting increasingly advanced, and, maybe generally significant of all, the world is creating impossible volumes of data.

As a result, AI is being blended into almost every aspect of our lives, from our cars and medical devices to robots and entertainment. Its here to prevail. Artificial intelligence will likely revamp every aspect of society, business, and industry over the coming decade. AI could impact everything from customers to employees to operations, making it indispensable that organizations begin understanding their place in this era of AI.

Now that we are well immersed into the AI revolution, its important to look at how the concept of artificial intelligence has been absorbed, why, and what it will mean in the future. The AI of today is a continuation of advances accomplished over the recent decades. The change, the reasons we are seeing artificial intelligence show up in such a large number of more places, isnt such a great amount about the AI advancements themselves, yet the innovations that encompass them data generation and handling power.

Ongoing advances in artificial intelligence have come essentially in zones where information researchers can copy human recognition capabilities, for example, perceiving objects in pictures or words in acoustic signs. Figuring out how to perceive designs in complex signs, for example, sound streams or pictures, is amazingly incredibleground-breaking enough that numerous individuals wonder why we arent utilizing deep learning procedures everywhere.

Pushing ahead, as groups become adjusted in their objectives and techniques for utilizing AI to accomplish them, deep learning will turn out to be a piece of each data scientists tool box. Consider this thought. We will have the option to incorporate object recognition in a framework, utilizing a pre-prepared artificial reasoning framework. However, at long last, we will understand that profound learning is simply another tool to utilize when it makes sense.

Now lets explore how AI is benefitting the mankind and serving various fields like marketing, finance, banking and so on in the real world.

Marketing is a way to glorify your products to attract more customers. In the early 2000s, in the event that we looked through an online store to discover an item without knowing its precise name, it would turn into a nightmare to discover the item. In any case, presently when we scan for a thing on any e-commerce store, we get every single imaginable result identified with the item.

A classic case of this is finding the right movies on Netflix. It examines millions of records to recommend shows and films that you might like based on your previous choices of films. As the data deposit grows, this technology is getting smarter and smarter every day.

AI has expanded its reach in the world of banking as well. AI solutions can be used to strengthen security across a number of business sectors, including retail and finance. By tracking card usage and endpoint access, security experts are more effectively preventing fraud. Organizations rely on AI to trace those anomalies by reviewing the behaviour of transactions.

In recent times, ventures have been depending on computers and information researchers to decide future patterns in the market. Trading for the most part relies upon the capacity to foresee the future precisely. Machines are incredible at this since they can crunch a colossal measure of information in a limited time.

In the time of ultra-high-recurring trade, monetary associations are going to AI to improve their stock trading performance and boost profit.

However, there are certain barriers to the rapid growth of AI. These barriers demonstrate that the path to the advancement of AI can be tricky and somewhat challenging. The present artificial intelligence systems dont have that deep understanding. What we see presently is shallow intelligence; the ability to copy confined human recognition abilities and sometimes outperforms humans on those secluded tasks.

Apart from this, teaching computers to learn for themselves is an exceptional shortcut. Theres intelligence in AI systems, but its not organic intelligence, and it doesnt follow the same rules as humans do.

Intelligence is a rare and valuable commodity. Regardless of ongoing advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that empower it to win games and drive vehicles, there are innumerable undiscovered open doors for trend setting technology to have a noteworthy and gainful impact on the world. Driven by three major patterns, were as of now in the center of an incredible new wave of AI.

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The Advancements in Real World Artificial Intelligence - Analytics Insight

EU struggles to go from talk to action on artificial intelligence – Science Business

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The EU is moving tentatively towards first-of-its-kind rules on the ways that companies can use artificial intelligence (AI), amid fears that the technology is galloping beyond regulators grasp.

Supporters of regulation say proper human oversight is needed for a rapidly developing technology that presents new risks to individual privacy and livelihoods. Others warn that the new rules could stifle innovation with lasting economic consequences.

We arent Big Brother China or Big Data US. We have to find our own way, said German MEP Axel Voss, who is about to take his seat on the European Parliaments new special committee on AI.

Having in mind that the AI tech is now of global strategic relevance, we have to be careful about over-regulating. Theres competition around the world. If we would like to play a role in the future, we need to do something thats not going to the extreme, said Voss, a member of the centre-right European People's Party.

In February, the European Commission presented its AI white paper, which states that new technologies in critical sectors should be subject to legislation. It likened the current situation to "the Wild West" and said it would focus on "high-risk" cases. The debate over the papers many elements will last through 2020 and into next year, when the EU executive will present its legislative proposal.

Researchers and industry are battling for influence over the AI policy.

Theres an incredible opportunity here to begin to tackle high-risk applications of AI. Theres also this real chance to set standards for the entire world, said Haydn Belfield, research associate and academic project manager at Cambridge Universitys Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

Policymakers and the public are concerned about applications such as autonomous weapons and government social scoring systems similar to those under development in China. Facial scanning software is already creeping into use Europe, operating with little oversight.

You dont have to be an expert in AI to see theres a really high risk to peoples life and liberty from some of these new applications, said Belfield.

Big tech companies, which have made large investments in new AI applications, are wary of the EUs plans to regulate.

Google has criticised measures in the commission's AI white paper, which it says could harm the sector. Last year, the comoany issued its own guidance on the technology, arguing that although it comes with hazards, existing rules and self-regulationwill be sufficientin the vast majority of instances.

In its response to the commissions proposal, Microsoft similarly urged the EU to rely on existing laws and regulatory frameworks as much as possible. However, the US tech company added that developers should be transparent about limitations and risks inherent in the use of any AI system. If this is not done voluntarily, it should be mandated by law, at least for high-risk use cases.

Thomas Metzinger, professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Mainz, and a member of the commission's 52-strong AI expert group says hes close to despondency because of how long its taking to regulate the field.

We can have clever discussions but what is actually being done? I have long given up on having an overview of the 160 or so ethics guidelines for AI out there in the world, he said.

Vague and non-committal guidelines

Metzinger has been strongly critical of the make-up of the commissions AI advisory group, which he says is tilted towards industry interests. Im disappointed by what weve produced. The guidelines are completely vague and non-committal. But its all relative. Compared to what China and US have produced, Europe has done better, he said.

Setting clear limits for AI is in step with Brussels more hands-on approach of recent years for the digital world. The commission is also setting red lines on privacy, antitrust and harmful internet content, which has inspired tougher rules elsewhere in the world.

Some argue that this prioritising of data protection, through the EUs flagship general data protection regulation (GDPR), has harmed AI growth in Europe.

The US and China account for almost all private AI investment in the world, according to Stanford Universitys AI index report. The European country with the most meaningful presence on AI is the UK, which has left the bloc and has hinted that it may detach itself from EU data protection laws in the future.

GDPR has slowed down AI development in Europe and potentially harmed it, says Sennay Ghebreab, associate professor of socially intelligent systems at the University of Amsterdam.

If you look at medical applications of AI, doctors are not able to use this technology yet [to the fullest]. This is an opportunity missed, he said. The dominating topics are ethics and privacy and this could lead us away from discussing the benefits that AI can bring.

GDPR is a very good piece of legislation, said Voss. But he agrees that it hasnt found the best balance between innovation and privacy. Because of its complexity, people are sometimes giving up, saying its easier to go abroad. We are finding our own way on digitisation in Europe but we shouldnt put up more bureaucratic obstacles.

Catching up

Those who support AI legislation are concerned it will take too long to regulate the sectors where it is deployed.

One highly-decorated legal expert told me it would be around nine years before a law was enforceable. Can you imagine where Google DeepMind will be in five years? said Metzinger, referring to the London lab owned by Google that is at the forefront of bringing AI to sectors like healthcare.

MEPs too are mindful of the need for speed, said Voss. Its very clear that we cant take the time we took with the GDPR. We wont catch up with the competition if it takes such a long time, he said. From the initial consultation, to implementation, GDPR took the best part of a decade to put together.

Regulation could be a fake, misleading solution, Ghebreab warned. Its the companies that use AI, rather than the technology itself, that need to be regulated. In general, top-down regulation is unlikely to lead to community-minded AI solutions. AI is in hands of big companies in US, in the hands of the government in China, and it should be in the hands of the people in Europe, Ghebreab said.

Ghebreab has been working on AI since the 1990s and has recently started a lab exploring socially minded applications, with backing from the city of Amsterdam.

As an example of how AI can help people, he points to an algorithm developed by the Swiss government and a team of researchers in the US that helps with the relocation of refugees. It aims to match refugees with regions that need their skills. Relocation today is based on capacity rather than taking into account refugees education or background, he said.

Interim solutions for AI oversight are not to everyones taste.

Self-regulation is fake and full of superficial promises that are hard to implement, said Metzinger.

The number one lesson Ive learned in Brussels is how contaminated the whole process is by industrial lobbying. Theres a lot of ethics-washing that is slowing down the path to regulation, he said.

Metzinger is aggrieved that, of the 52 experts picked to advise the commission on AI, only four were ethicists. Twenty-six are direct industry representatives, he said. There were conflicts, and people including myself did not sign off on all our work packages. Workshops organised with industry lacked transparency, said Metzinger.

In response, commission spokesman Charles Manoury said the expert panel was formed on the basis of an open selection process, following anopen call for expressions of interest.

Digital Europe, which represents tech companies such as Huawei, Google, Facebook and Amazon, was also contacted for comment.

Adhering to AI standards is ultimately in companies interests, argues Belfield. After the techlash weve been seeing, it will help to make companies seem more trustworthy again, he said.

Developing trustworthy AI is where the EU can find its niche, according to a recent report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Designed to alleviate potential harm as well as to permit accountability and oversight, this vision for AI-enabled technologies could set Europe apart from its global competitors, the report says.

The idea has particular thrust in France, where the government, alongside Canada, pushed for the creation of the new global forum on ethical AI development.

Public distrust is the fundamental brake on AI development, according to the UK governments Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation. In the absence of trust, consumers are unlikely to use new technologies or share the data needed to build them, while industry will be unwilling to engage in new innovation programmes for fear of meeting opposition and experiencing reputational damage, its AI Barometer report says.

Banning AI

One idea floated by the commission earlier this year was a temporary ban on the use of facial recognition in public areas for up to five years.

There are grave concerns about the technology, which uses surveillance cameras, computer vision, and predictive imaging to keep tabs on large groups of people.

Facial recognition is a genius technology for finding missing children but a heinous technology for profiling, propagating racism, or violating privacy, said Oren Etzioni, professor of computer science and CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle.

Several state and local governments in the US have stopped law enforcement officers from using facial recognition databases. Trials of the technology in Europe have provoked a public backlash.

Privacy activists argue the technology is potentially authoritarian, because it captures images without consent. The technology can also have a racial bias. If a system is trained primarily on white male faces, but fewer women and people of colour, it will be less accurate for the latter groups.

Despite its flaws, facial recognition has potential for good, said Ghebreab, who doesnt support a moratorium. We have to be able to show how people can benefit from it; now the narrative is how people suffer from it, he said.

Voss doesnt back a ban for particular AI applications either. We should have some points in the law saying what you can and cant do with AI, otherwise youll face a ban. We should not think about an [outright] ban, he said.

Metzinger favours limiting facial recognition in some contexts, but he admits, its very difficult to tease this apart. You would still want to be able, for counter terrorism measures, to use the technology in public spaces, he said.

The Chinese government has controversially used the tool to identify pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, and for racial profiling and control of Uighur muslims. Face scans in China are used to pick out and fine jaywalkers and citizens in Shanghai will soon have to verify their identity in pharmacies by scanning their faces.

It comes back to whom you trust with your data, Metzinger said. I would basically still trust the German government I would never want to be in the hands of the Hungarian government though.

Defence is the other big, controversial area for AI applications. The EUs white paper mentions military AI just once, in a footnote.

Some would prefer if the EU banned the development of lethal autonomous weapons altogether, though few expect this to happen.

There is a lot we dont know. A lot is classified. But you can deduce from investment levels that theres much less happening in Europe [on military AI] than in the US and China, said Amy Ertan, cyber security researcher at the University of London.

Europe is not a player in military AI but it is making steps to change this. The European Defence Agency is running 30 projects that include AI aspects, with more in planning, said the agencys spokeswoman Elisabeth Schoeffmann.

The case for regulation

Author and programmer Brian Christian says regulating AI is a cat and mouse game.

It reminds me of financial regulation, which is very difficult to write because the techniques change so quickly. By the time you pass the law, the field has moved on, he said.

Christians new book looks at the urgent alignment problem, where AI systems dont do what we want or what we expect. A string of jaw-dropping breakthroughs have alternated with equally jaw-dropping disasters, he said.

Recent examples include Amazons AI-powered recruiting system, which filtered out applications that included womens colleges, and showed preference for CVs that included linguistic habits more prone to men, like use of the words executed and captured, said Christian. After several repairs failed, engineers quietly scuttled it entirely in 2018.

Then there was the recurring issue with Google Photos labelling pictures of black people as gorillas; after a series of fixes didnt work, engineers resorted to manually deleting the gorilla label altogether.

Stories like these illustrate why discussions on ethical responsibility have only grown more urgent, Christian said.

If you went to one of the major AI conferences, ethics and safety are now the most rapidly growing and dynamic subsets of the field. Thats either reassuring or worrying, depending on how you view these things.

Europes data privacy rules have helped ethics and safety move in from the fringes of AI, said Christian. One of the big questions for AI is transparency and explain-ability, he said. The GDPR introduces a right to know why an AI system denied you a mortgage or a credit card, for example.

The problem however is that AI decisions are not always intelligible to those who create these systems, let alone to ordinary people.

I heard about lawyers at AI companies who were complaining about the GDPR and how it demanded something that wasnt scientifically possible. Lawyers pleaded with regulators. The EU gave them two years notice on a major research problem, Christian said.

Were familiar with the idea that regulation can constrain, but here is a case where a lot of our interest in transparency and explanation was driven by a legal requirement no one knew how to meet.

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EU struggles to go from talk to action on artificial intelligence - Science Business

Taillevent Readies to Install Wind Turbines off Taiwan – Offshore WIND

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Jan De Nul and Hitachi have issued a notice on the commencement of wind turbine installation works off the Taiwanese coast.

The work will be carried out by Jan De Nuls vessel Taillevent, which was reported earlier this year as having left the turbine installation at the German Trianel Windpark Borkum II for a project in Taiwan.

According to a Notice to Mariners from Jan De Nul and Hitachi from 13 July, the vessel will be installing a total of 21 offshore wind turbines at coordinates that pinpoint a site off Fangyuan in the Changhua county, Taiwan.

The wind turbine installation phase is marked as taking place from 15 July until 31 December, subject to weather conditions.

In April 2018, the Jan De Nul-Hitachi consortium was awardeda contractfor Taiwan Power Companys (TPCs) 21-turbine Changhua Phase 1 offshore wind farm, located off the coast of Fangyuan and scheduled to be built by the end of this year.

Under the contract, Jan De Nul is responsible for the design, fabrication and installation of the foundations, the installation of the wind turbines, the supply and installation of the onshore and offshore cables, as well as for the upgrading of the substation. Hitachi is in charge of manufacturing, assembly, operation and maintenance, and other works related to the offshore wind turbines.

According to AIS data, Taillevent is currently in the Singapore port.

The 109.2 MW Changhua Phase I project will comprise 21 Hitachi 5.2 MW offshore wind turbines with a downwind rotor.

Theonshore cable installation, subcontracted to Taiwanese company Star Energy Corporation, started back in 2018 and offshore cabling activities began in June this year.

Theprojects four-legged jacket foundationsand their associated pin piles have been transported to Taiwan over the past couple of months.

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Taillevent Readies to Install Wind Turbines off Taiwan - Offshore WIND

Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines Market Share 2020: By Purity, Application, Regional Outlook and Forecasts to 2026 – Cole of Duty

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Study on the Global Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines Market

The report on the global Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines market reveals that the Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of ~XX% during the forecast period (2019-2029). The report provides a thorough assessment of the current and future prospects of the Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines market across various geographies. Further, the report provides accurate data related to the growth strategies adopted by leading market players operating in the Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines market.

The quantitative and qualitative assessment of the various segments of the Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines market enables stakeholders, investors, upcoming and established market players to devise robust business development strategies and expand their business. The report tracks the recent developments within the Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines market in terms of innovation, technological progress, regulatory framework, and more.

Get PDF Sample Copy of this Report to understand the structure of the complete report: (Including Full TOC, List of Tables & Figures, Chart) @ https://www.researchmoz.com/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=2702918&source=atm

Major Doubts Pertaining to the Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines Market Addressed in the Report

Segmentation Analysis of the Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines Market

The growth potential of the Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines market in each region is accurately depicted in the report. The market attractiveness index included in the report enables readers to identify the most lucrative pockets within the Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines market and make informed business decisions.

The report throws light on the adoption pattern of different products along with a thorough analysis of the pricing and supply-demand ratio of each product.

Do You Have Any Query Or Specific Requirement? Ask to Our Industry [emailprotected] https://www.researchmoz.com/enquiry.php?type=E&repid=2702918&source=atm

Competitive Landscape

The competitive landscape section of the report tracks the business proceedings of the key players operating in the Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines market. The pricing, marketing, sales, and promotional strategies adopted by each market player is represented in the report.

Segment by Type, the Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines market is segmented intoERW PipesLSAW PipesSSAW Pipes

Segment by Application, the Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines market is segmented intoCrude Oil TransmissionNatural Gas TransmissionOther

Regional and Country-level AnalysisThe Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines market is analysed and market size information is provided by regions (countries).The key regions covered in the Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines market report are North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East and Africa. It also covers key regions (countries), viz, U.S., Canada, Germany, France, U.K., Italy, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, U.A.E, etc.The report includes country-wise and region-wise market size for the period 2015-2026. It also includes market size and forecast by Type, and by Application segment in terms of sales and revenue for the period 2015-2026.Competitive Landscape and Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines Market Share AnalysisOffshore Oil & Gas Pipelines market competitive landscape provides details and data information by players. The report offers comprehensive analysis and accurate statistics on revenue by the player for the period 2015-2020. It also offers detailed analysis supported by reliable statistics on revenue (global and regional level) by players for the period 2015-2020. Details included are company description, major business, company total revenue and the sales, revenue generated in Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines business, the date to enter into the Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines market, Offshore Oil & Gas Pipelines product introduction, recent developments, etc.The major vendors covered:Baoji Petroleum Steel PipeJFEJindal SAW LtdEUROPIPE GroupEssar SteelJiangsu Yulong Steel PipeAmerican SpiralWeld Pipe Company, LLCZhejiang KinglandTenarisShengli Oil & Gas PipeCNPC Bohai Equipment ManufacturingCHU KONG PIPEBaosteelBorusan Mannesmann

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Key Findings of the Report

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Offshore Crane – Market Share Analysis and Research Report by 2025 – CueReport

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Latest updates on Offshore Crane market, a comprehensive study enumerating the latest price trends and pivotal drivers rendering a positive impact on the industry landscape. Further, the report is inclusive of the competitive terrain of this vertical in addition to the market share analysis and the contribution of the prominent contenders toward the overall industry.0

- These machines are primarily used due to their high precision in heavy-duty operations such as assembly, repair, and supply of oil & gas extraction systems

Offshore Crane Market is expected to exceed USD 5 billion by 2026. The ongoing exploration of new offshore oil & gas fields will surge the demand for offshore cranes.

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- These machines are increasingly being used for pipe maintenance & repair operations in the offshore oil & gas industry

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- Key players operating in the offshore crane market are Palfinger AG, Heila Group, Liebherr, National Oilwell Varco, Kenz Figee, Huisman Equipment, Seatrax, Inc., and MacGregor.

- The growing demand for renewable energy due to the rising world population and increasing urbanization will surge the demand for offshore cranes in renewable energy applications

- Players are focusing on price and product differentiation strategies to sustain in the competitive market. They are offering products to help improve energy efficiency and reliability.

The growing demand for maintenance & repair of oil & gas extraction systems will drive the offshore crane market growth. The equipment is primarily used in the maintenance & repair of oil extraction pipes. Increasing investments in subsea construction projects are compelling the demand for offshore cranes with high lifting capacity and maximum safety. In November 2019, National Petroleum Construction Company (NPCC) announced an investment of USD 89.8 million to boost subsea construction projects in the UAE. NPCC is planning to undertake several deep-water projects in the region as well as across the globe over the next few years, providing opportunities for offshore industry development. However, high installation as well as maintenance & operational cost of these machines is hampering market growth.

The demand for knuckle boom cranes is expected to rise significantly over the forecast timeline due to their low maintenance requirements and maximum efficiency. These cranes are used in marine applications for loading & unloading operations. Knuckle cranes offer enhanced strength & flexibility, thereby increasingly being used in marine as well as oil & gas industries. Increasing spending on the construction of new port & harbors is further expected to propel the demand for offshore cranes over the forecast timeline.

The demand for heavy-duty offshore cranes with the lifting capacity of above 5,000 mt is expected to rise over the next years due to their ability to perform complex operations in harsh working conditions. The equipment is primarily used in the construction of large oil & gas as well as wind farm projects in offshore environments. Increasing government initiatives to promote renewable energy will drive the equipment demand, majorly in Asia Pacific, Europe, and the MEA regions.

The North America offshore crane market is anticipated to grow over the forecast timeline owing to the increasing demand for electricity across the region. The U.S. government is primarily focusing on generating maximum electricity from renewable energy sources including offshore wind. In 2019, Vineyard Wind proposed an 800 MW wind farm project in Massachusetts to provide power to more than 400,000 homes with clean energy. The company is expected to invest approximately USD 2.8 billion for the project development.

Major Highlights from Table of contents are listed below for quick lookup into Offshore Crane Market report

Chapter 1. Competitive Landscape

Chapter 2. Company Profiles

Chapter 3. Methodology & Scope

Chapter 4. Executive Summary

Chapter 5. Offshore Crane industryInsights

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Scientists Say the Moon Is Way Younger than We Thought – Futurism

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Just A Kid

According to a sophisticated new model, the Moon is far younger than scientists previously thought to the tune of some 85 million years.

Its not such a drastic shift when you consider how long the Moons been around. The research, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, adjusts the age of the Moon from 4.51 billion years old to 4.425 billion, with 25-million-year-long error bars on either side. But it does clarify some of the mysteries surrounding how it formed in the first place.

The prevailing theory is that a Mars-sized rock crashed into the Earth and the debris eventually consolidated to form the Moon. The still-forming Earth may have been covered by an ocean of magma and this new research posits that the Moon had a magma ocean over 1,000 kilometers deep as well.

The main disagreement, however, is over how long it took that ocean to cool: Existing models said the Moon solidified after 35 million years.

The results from the model show that the moons magma ocean was long-lived and took almost 200 million years to completely solidify into mantle rock, lead author Maxime Maurice, a planetary geophysicist at the German Aerospace Center, said in a press release.

By modeling how the composition of the Moon rocks formed by that ocean changed over time, the team was able to arrive at its new age for the Moon.

The new timeline ties neatly to the Earths history as well,meaning the Moon formed at about the same time as the Earths core.

READ MORE: Researchers find younger age for Earths moon [German Aerospace Center]

More on the Moon: New Theory: the Moon Formed From Magma Blasted Away From Earth

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Scientists Say the Moon Is Way Younger than We Thought - Futurism

Physicists Say This Is the Smallest Unit of Time That Could Exist – Futurism

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Micro Time

One of the fundamental mysteries surrounding the concept of time is whether its continuous and our chronological measurements are just a way of making the sense of the world, or if it actually breaks down into discrete ticks at the teeniest scales.

Assuming the latter is true Live Science reports that our technology isnt yet nearly sensitive enough to find out for sure a team of physicists from Penn State has now theorized the absolute maximum amount of time that a universal oscillation could take.

The number is bafflingly small. The largest possible value this fundamental unit of time could be is one thousandth of a quectosecond, according to research published last month in the journal Physical Review Letters. Thats ten to the -33rd power or, as Live Science helpfully put it, just one millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second.

And thats just the upper limit, based on the performance of the best atomic clocks we have. In the abstract world of mathematical theory, Live Science reports the absolute smallest unit of time could be yet another 100 billion times shorter.

The best atomic clocks can measure down to a tenth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, or ten to the -19th power, Live Science reports. If the fundamental unit of time were any larger, it would eventually make our atomic clocks fall out of sync.

But this is all theory. As atomic clocks improve, scientists may find themselves exploring smaller and smaller units of time before they ever hit a wall and time may be truly continuous, rather than discrete.

READ MORE: The universes clock might have bigger ticks than we imagine [Live Science]

More on time: Astrophysicist Says He Knows How to Build a Time Machine

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Physicists Say This Is the Smallest Unit of Time That Could Exist - Futurism

Will the Pandemic Blow Up College in America? – POLITICO

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Galloways business-school colleague Hans Taparia, an expert on the food industry, opines that online classes will soon replace campus learning now that we have had the pandemic experience of taking courses while confined to quarters. When the worry about the virus disappears, he assures us, the benefits of asynchronous learning will remain.

Maybe soand its likely the pandemic really will shake something up about our higher-education establishment. There will be changes. There will be schools that go bankrupt. And the pandemic has unquestionably revealed some deep inequity issues with higher education, which the crisis gives us the opportunity and the incentive to get right.

When it comes to the end of college as we know it, however, weve seen this movie beforeand college has survived it. The last time America was swept by this particular combination of economic collapse and technophilia was in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, and that too brought predictions of massive change to higher education. The book titles reflected the mood of the moment: Academically Adrift, College Unbound, The End of College, Higher Education in Crisis?

Following the model of disruptive innovation laid out by Clayton Christensen in the late 1990s, authors were confident that economic, social and technological factors would disintermediate traditional campuses. Christensen himself made this case in a 2011 book, The Innovative University. Technology was creating the future of learning, and one either got on board or went extinct. Education writers often made the pilgrimage to Silicon Valley, where all that money, all those gizmos and all that talk of the future made the inefficiencies of campus life seem at best quaint, and at worst pernicious. The mania of the moment was MOOCs, or massive online open courses, which looked set to displace college itself.

Theres a critique of college underlying all these promises, and the critics have a point. Theres no question colleges and universities in the United States are unusual institutions; their business models evolved in economies very different from our own. No other country has anything quite like Americas higher-education system. Elite schools are superexpensive (for those able to pay full fare); the great public institutions continue to serve hundreds of thousands of students from all walks of life while also sponsoring the most advanced research on the planet. In a culture and economy increasingly customizable so as to facilitate the most efficient transactions, universities bundle many different functions together, with high overhead, high personnel costs and long-standing rules and traditions. When colleges add technology to their operations, they dont reduce costs; they just increase expectations. And so, we are told, these are enterprises ripe for disruption.

But one persons inefficiencies are another persons opportunities. Colleges and universities dont just bundle different functions; they bundle different kinds of people together, too. On a university campus, classics majors sit next to economics majors in a neuroscience class or at a basketball game. This lived experience of diversity is unlike the rest of our very segregated society. And it offers the kind of serendipitous encounters that lead to transformative learning. Campuses arent just a collection of climbing walls and parties; theyre a rare venue for bringing together people open to discoveries about themselves and the world. Despite the warnings from Silicon Valley, students and their families want that campus experience, and see it as a critical part of ones life. Theres a reason why the best residential college campuses havent just survived over the past several decades, but have grown. Theres a reason why families today talk about the trauma of being sent home from school without finishing the semester.

Many colleges and universities have long been managing disruption, and even growing from it, rather than being victimized by it. This is especially true in regard to higher educations relationship to technology. Large tech companies have been heavily involved with higher education for years. Apple developed iTunes University in 2007, and many schools shared their content on its platform; the schools are still there, though iTunes U is being discontinued. Harvard-MITs EdX has been producing classes seen by millions of learners without putting any notable dents in Harvard or MIT. Stanford professors started Udacity and Coursera, and both companies have found a spot, if not quite sustainability, in the higher ed marketplace. Georgia Tech, Southern New Hampshire University, Berklee College of Music and Arizona State, to name just a sampling of schools, have developed powerful platforms for remote learning, often in some combination with in-person classes. Ive been teaching humanities classes on Coursera for several years, and have had more than 100,000 students in my classes. During the pandemic, more than a thousand people have joined the courses each week. But there is no sign that this appetite for online learning diminishes the interest in studying on campus. Universities learned this when they made classes available for free on the internet and applications still kept pouring in.

Right now, students who have been sheltering at home these past few months are clamoring to get back to campus. Many have reported that if their schools are fully online in the fall, they will take a break from education and find something else to do. The pandemic has demonstrated that faculty can deliver their courses online and students can grasp the materialbut its also abundantly clear that critical parts of the experience are lost when the learning community is dispersed.

The fact that tech wont be the disruptor doesnt mean that no disruption is needed right now. And the pandemic is helping clarify just how colleges should change. A popular phrase in this pandemic period is were all in this together, but its increasingly clear that the disease is having a disproportionate impact on poor and marginalized populations. Inequality, whether in terms of disparities in health care, underlying conditions or job security, is everywhere evident. And in America, equality is profoundly racialized, as Black Lives Matter activists and their allies have highlighted this summer, and will likely press as an issue as the semester gets underway.

Inequality remains the great problem facing higher education in the United States, and it is suddenly very visible on our screens for those who normally teach on campus. Displaced onto Zoom, teachers long accustomed to the equalizing environment of the classroom have been disconcerted by the disparities they see among homebound students. Their better-off students check in with new laptops, great Wi-Fi, and seem to study in posh surroundings; the less well-off struggle for access and privacyand any time to read while juggling the responsibilities they carry in their families.

Higher education can reinforce privilege and divisions, or it can be a vehicle for social mobility and cohesion. As we think about the return to campus, we can learn some lessons from the past few months. Colleges large and small have decided not to require standardized tests for admissions this year because of the challenges of testing during a pandemic. But some students, especially those from low income families, have long known that SATs and ACTs favor those with money for tutors and time for organized test prep. Nobody should go back to requiring these pseudo-objective exams.

As was the case in the summer of 2016, likewise in this election year, well hear again and again that progressive puritans (or illiberal liberals) are destroying free speech. Cancel culture has replaced political correctness as a label to affix to those one finds too radical, too weird or just too rude. Of course, there are examples of people unjustly fired or attacked for a perceived departure from campus orthodoxy, and university leaders must resist calls to punish divergent points of view. But underneath the argumentboth the callouts from the left, and the anxiety from conservatives and traditional liberalsis a real reminder that maintaining civil intellectual diversity takes work, and that a campus is exactly where we can build the habit of listening to those with views different from ones own.

Higher education should also have learned from this pandemic that the bubble of campus life is an illusion. Rather than seeing eight semesters away from home as a break from real life, colleges and universities should find more ways to connect their students to the towns they live in and to a country that needs their participation in public life. If students are attending their college from their hometown, they have even more opportunities to knit education and citizenship together. This can take the form of encouraging political participation at the local or national level as a part of a students education. During the pandemic, more than 300 schools have joined Wesleyan in E2020, a program to develop civic preparedness among our students so that they can participate more thoughtfully in the nations political institutions. This will be good for the students, their schools and the country.

Today, more academics can see the promise of hybrid or low-residency models that combine technology and in-person educational experiences; programs that reduce the time to degree can make good use of online classes to help students and their families save money. There should be nothing sacred about the academic calendar. When universities reopen their gates, they can complement the amplification of learning that campus provides with remote educational offerings and work experiences. Programs through which students work in business, the professions and not-for-profits can help ensure that ones education better prepares one for life beyond the university.

Such paths have already been charted by organizations like AmeriCorps, which has integrated national service with education. President Donald Trumps proposals to cut the Corporation for National and Community Service are exactly the wrong way to go. Instead, we need the federal government to incentivize more states to create their own programs to integrate education, job training and public service. Colleges and universities can support their states efforts to develop programs that incentivize teamwork, innovation, and civic preparedness beyond borders of campus. This isnt unbundling; its the construction of more paths for people eager to learn.

The closure of campuses over the past few months has forced us to confront what is most valuable about a college experience, and it would be a missed opportunity if the greatest thing we learned in this pandemic is how to better wash our hands. To the extent we can profit from this dismal experience, we should use it to build greater access to a broad, pragmatic education in which students learn deeply not only from the delivery of course material but from one another as well.

Weve had enough attempts at smug disruption, whether by anti-intellectual populists or technophilic prognosticators. No, the pandemic does not have to lead to an impoverished educational experience in the name of efficiency. If anything, the lived experience of social isolation is reinforcing the importance of interacting with others in physical proximityeven if you have to wear a mask.

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6 Types of Road Trips – How to Plan a Road Trip – Country Living

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After an unpredictable first half of 2020, Americans can all agree that theyre itching to travel. Road trips have been a huge summer trend in the current climate mainly because many find it safer than flying. Youre in complete control of your adventuretheres no waiting in airport security lines, sitting in crowded spaces, or fees for missing your departure. Theres a sense of adventure thats so satisfying, discovering all that this beautiful country has to offer...right in your backyard.

Based on a recent survey we conducted, we found that people are really looking to reconnect with friends, family and the great outdoors in their travels this summer. More than a third of our respondents ranked wanting to visit family or friends who live within driving distance as their top reason for taking a road trip over safety, says Sheryl Connelly, chief futurist at Ford Motor Company. Considering the impact of social distancing and restrictions on being able to travel or visit loved ones, this makes sense. What we also found is that people are really looking to slow down and make the most of their time away from home. More than 20% wanted to take a road trip just so they could explore and see the sights along the way to their destination.

Planning a road trip has endless opportunities from camping under the stars, checking out National Parks, or even going solo and taking some time for well-deserved self care. Youre not restricted to flying on a schedule, renting a car, and getting a hotel like regular vacations. And its okay if it doesnt go as plannedit might actually make it more fun. Veering off of the itinerary will make for a great adventure. Not sure what type of road trip to take? Here are different types of road trips to see whats best for you.

A solo road trip can be for anyone, but especially for those who are feeling stuck in their life or in search of an adventure. Theres something magical about being on the road exploring American gems, music blasting with the thoughts in your head as your copilot.

Harley Davidson

Youll feel a level of power, confidence, and freedom on a solo road trip that feels so good. I took a solo road trip down Highway 1 in California along the coast to Big Sur, and I just felt so free. I couldnt imagine doing that trip with anyone. Youre completely in control for all decisions from music to where to stop for lunch to where youre sleeping for the night. Even though youre alone, youll make a lot of friends along the wayI still keep in touch with some people I met on hiking trails and during nights out.

Yes, we all know the Grand Canyon (its beautiful and breathtaking), but did you know that there are over 400 National Parks in our Land of the Free? Planning a road trip to visit National Parks is for the history buff and outdoorsy type who enjoys camping.

Josh Carter

The National Park Service has a great website to easily learn and find hidden gems like Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico. Explore Yosemite, plan a camping adventure along the way. Chances are, there are lesser-known National Parks within a few hours of your home that you've never visited.

No matter how close you are with your family, you will definitely learn something new about them after spending so much time together in close quarters on the road. With any road trip, its all about communicating with one another and setting boundaries. Give each other space when neededyou dont need to be on top of each other 24/7.

For me, when Im traveling Im always thinking about what stories Im going to tell my parents. But with a family road trip, we all get to experience it together. I dont need to try explaining these underwhelming stories that usually become a "you had to be there" moment. Its something well be able to reminisce about for years to come.

Best friends are the family we get to choose. They know us better than anyone else, no matter how far life takes us, theyll always be there to pick up your call. Road tripping with your besties can be an awesome time, but its important to assign roles and responsibilities before the trip to avoid conflict during the trip.

A lot goes into researching and planning the itinerary. It wouldnt be fair for just one person in the group to do all of the planning when the rest of your friends just come along without putting in any effort. Your friends each have different interests, which should be discussed ahead of time so the stops on the trip are things that everyone wants to do. With a little teamwork, it will be smooth sailing.

As much as tourists want to see the sights, they also want to taste the local food. For the foodies out there, thats what their trips revolve around. Theyre known for finding the best restaurants, seeking out underground spots, and trying cuisine that they cant get back at home.

Creating a road trip around food can literally go anywhere. Definitely make some stops down south for some true southern hospitality. Along with food, add some brewery tour stops to explore local beer and spirits too.

The road trip that could make or break a relationship. Your relationship is your business, but I wouldnt recommend traveling hours in a car together at a time until your relationship is pretty rock solid. Some bickering is bound to happen, but shouldnt be the reason for a breakup.

A road trip with someone you love is a great way to get to know them better and see them in a way that maybe you didnt see before. Traveling to beautiful sights and camping is always more fun when you have someone to share it with.

No matter which way you road trip, youll get to see America through a lens that perhaps you didnt experience before. After being kept home for months with previous trips cancelled, its a journey of self discovery and learning more about those who join you. It taught me that I didnt need to get on a plane and fly across the Atlantic Ocean to seek adventure. Who knows where the road will take you, but Im sure itll make for a great story.

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The Harpers Letter Is a Weak Defense of Free Speech – The …

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The letter in Harpers vaguely alludes to instances of alleged silencing that sparked complicated discussions, very often about institutional racism. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the letter concludes, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. (At least two of the signatories have since distanced themselves from the statement, and on Friday another group of writers and academics published a lengthy counterletter that originated in a Slack channel called Journalists of Color.)

That the signatories of a letter denouncing a perceived constriction of public speech are among their industries highest-paid and most widely published figures is a large and obvious irony. Many of the writers who signed their name have been employed or commissioned by outlets including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vox, The Washington Post, and this magazine. Several have received lucrative book deals; otherslike Rowling, Salman Rushdie, and Wynton Marsalisare global icons. The educators on the list are affiliated with universities including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Columbia.

Theres something darkly comical about the fretfulness of these elite petitioners. Its telling that the censoriousness they identify as a national plague isnt the racism that keeps Black journalists from reporting on political issues, or the transphobia that threatens their colleagues lives. The letter denounces the restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, strategically blurring the line between these two forces. But the letters chief concern is not journalists living under hostile governments, despite the fact that countries around the world impose draconian limits on press freedom.

Across the globe, the challenge facing journalists and intellectuals is not the pain of Twitter scorn; the Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that at least 250 journalists were imprisoned worldwide last year for their reporting. In the U.S., the Trump administration continues to threaten reporters safety and undermine the belief that journalists play a valuable role in a democracy. The country is moving deeper into an economic recession, decimating industries including journalism and academia. And yet the suddenly unemployed people the Harpers statement references clearly lost their jobs not because of a pandemic or government pressure, but for actions criticized as potentially harming marginalized groups. This small group includes James Bennet, the former editor of the New York Times editorial page (and a former editor in chief of this magazine), who was forced to resign after the op-ed page he supervised published an article by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton that endorsed state violence.

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The Free Speech Grifters | GQ

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In one of the more awkward exchanges on television in recent memory, the stand-up comedian Bill Burr sat down with Bill Maher on HBO's Real Time. "I think we have something in common," said Maher. "We think political correctness may be ruining comedy." To Maher's surprise, a visibly irked Burr disagreed.

"It's a really weird time where people are bringing [PC outrage] up all the time like it's a major problem," said Burr. "Like usual, they're acting like the sky is falling. It isn't. It's a fun time." A flustered Maher turned ashen. He is among a growing class of punditscall them the Free Speech Grifterswho flog PC culture as a singularly eminent threat to the freedom of expression in America. And Burr, a decidedly un-PC comic, punctured the narrative.

After that 2015 interview, Burr never appeared on Real Time again. But Maher did find someone to be "on his side": New York Times columnist Bari Weiss.

In just the past month, Weiss has appeared on Real Time twice, most recently to discuss the dust-up over her identifying an American-born Asian as an immigrant. "I love immigrants," Weiss told Maher, despite the fact that no one accused her of the opposite. "Saying 'I am offended' is a way of making someone radioactive, a way of smearing their reputation."

Weiss sidestepped measured criticisms and mild mockery so that she could claim that she was crucified because she "departs from woke orthodoxy." It was a sleight of hand. And it wouldn't be the first time.

Two days prior, Weiss's column titled "We're All Fascists Now" highlighted the protest of a Christina Hoff Sommers talk at Lewis & Clark Law School, the latest example in an overexposed series of well-meaning college students acting like morons. It was riddled with misrepresentations. To frame the debate as another instance of the liberals attacking fellow liberals, Weiss described Ms. Sommers as a "self-identified" feminist and a "registered" Democrat. To that end, she withheld from readers Sommers's more relevant professional affiliation: resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative think tank, which counts feminist Democrat heroes Dick Cheney and Dinesh D'Souza among its past fellows.

Among the Free Speech Grifters, Sommers has perfected the art. She likes to call herself a feminist, specifically a "factual" one. But if there has been one feminist cause worth addressing in the past 30 years, you wouldn't know it by reading her work. She has had plenty to say on how biological preferences may account for gender distribution in STEM fields, while she's been silent on harassment of women in tech and finance. And she's been outspoken about the due-process rights of men accused of rape on college campuses, but apparently has no interest in addressing the complexity of a crime that is notoriously difficult to prove.

Plenty of scholars and writers have challenged feminist talking points. The economist Claudia Goldin wasn't tossed out of Harvard for her work on the gender pay gap, pinpointing childcare, not gender directly, as the cause. Sommers likes to position herself as a Goldin, a noble academic who questions received wisdom to further a worthy cause. The difference between the two is that Goldin offers both better data and solutions to nuanced issues while Sommers only offers naysaying. In interviews and recorded talks, a soft-spoken Sommers emphasizes the importance of being reasonable and polite, tut-tutting meanness. But her stance toward those with whom she disagrees is mostly derisive, serving up red meat to a social-media following rabid for the denigration of feminist and minority causes.

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July 18: An entitled world of mostly white privilege. Readers debate WE Charity, free speech and systemic racism, plus other letters to the editor -…

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holds a press conference at Rideau Cottage in Ottawa on July 13, 2020.

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Re Civil Servants Testimony Fails To Clear Up All WE Charity Questions (July 17): From 1975 to 1995, my husband, the actor and writer George Robertson, and I were deeply involved with UNICEF Canada and UNICEF Ontario. Notable celebrities including Sir Peter Ustinov, Audrey Hepburn, Danny Kaye, Harry Belafonte, Maggie Smith, Sharon, Lois and Bram and many others joined us in giving countless hours of time to UNICEF. There were also television commercials where all creative work and time was donated.

Not a penny was ever paid for appearances. George went across Canada speaking to youth (his role in the Police Academy films made him quite popular with all age groups). It is a very sad day for me when notable figures cannot donate time and energy to charitable causes they believe deserve support.

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Adele Robertson Toronto

Re Parents. Trapped. (Report on Business, July 11): Lack of child care may both prevent women from going back to work and cripple our economy. But Ottawa says the solution might be expensive. Expenses be damned! Lets get more child-care spaces and give women the opportunity to get back to work.

My daughter-in-law is looking after three kids, ages 6, 3 and eight months, on her own. Her husband works from home but, because of firings at his company, has to attempt the work of three. He is on the computer day and night.

Its extremely stressful. And there are thousand of families in similar situations.

Fiona McCall Toronto

Re These Revolutionary Times Have A Downside (July 11): Racism, in its most common forms, means systems, policies and attitudes that create unfair disadvantages for people because of the colour of their skin. Cognitive studies of the brain and the way we think have demonstrated that every one of us white, Black, brown has unconscious biases based on our upbringings.

Science has proven that this affects the way we make decisions about hiring and promotion, entitlement to government or other benefits and arrests, charges and sentences in criminal cases. It also affects the way our fast brain reacts when we hear a particular accent or see a person of a particular race in the course of daily activities. It is a reality in Canada, where racialized people have lived these experiences since they were born or arrived in this country.

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Progress begins with the recognition and elimination of these everyday human reactions, so that life is more fair and equal for all of us. Frustration, fear and suspicion of motives arise when people are unable to reach this starting point.

Raj Anand Former chief commissioner, Ontario Human Rights Commission; Toronto

Re Whatever Happened To Nuanced Disagreement? (Opinion, July 11): Columnist Robyn Urback supports the claim by authors of an open letter in Harpers Magazine that cancel culture has gone too far. It could also be argued that this is exactly how the process of achieving equilibrium, or the middle ground, works.

When the pendulum has swung so far in one direction, it often needs to swing all the way back before coming to rest in the middle. We have tolerated hate speech, police brutality and racial discrimination for so long that we may need to allow a period of intolerance toward those things, before we can achieve the ideal of fair and open dialogue.

As I see it, the problem is not with the message of the letter, but with the timing.

Elizabeth Causton Victoria

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Who gets published and who does not is inherently political. For a movement to demand that some voices be elevated, and that others take a backseat, should not be seen as signs of the illiberalism of our times, but rather necessary correctives to the current forums of social debate.

The real crisis of free speech can be found in the violent repression of protesters in the streets. Curfews and tear gas are censorship who cares what people are saying about J.K. Rowling on Twitter!

Ella Bedard Toronto

Theres a lot of wounded outrage in the air.

First there is the defensive reaction of senior Liberal officials to public scrutiny of family connections with WE Charity. Then there is the open letter to Harpers Magazine about the threat posed by so-called cancel culture to the free expression of ideas.

I believe the Liberals and the letters signatories share some things in common: one is the belief that they are decent, thoughtful people with virtuous motives. Such may be true, but it is complicated by a second thing: the possession of a kind of privilege that makes it possible to conflate your own beliefs and interests with the public good.

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Privilege also dampens the impulse to self-reflect, which might have prompted Justin Trudeau to wonder whether his personal connections constituted a conflict of interest, or the letter writers to think how far and to whom freedom of expression ever actually extended. I find these appeals to liberal values amount to self-defence: of an entitled world of mostly white privilege that is experiencing some ripples of resistance, and signs of radical change that are long overdue.

Susie OBrien Hamilton

Re Hidden Canada (Arts & Pursuits, July 11): The irony was not lost on this southern Alberta resident that Oldman River, one of the pristine areas in Canada highlighted by The Globe, is near the site of provincial plans for a major metallurgical coal-mining venture. Granted, the development will create much-needed employment and cash flow for Alberta but at what cost?

The sparkling waters of the river would be at risk of contamination; the richness of critical wildlife corridors at risk of increased vehicular traffic. Alberta seems to be misinformed and devoid of compassion for provincial wild-lands and the associated flora and fauna.

John Nightingale Lethbridge, Alta.

Re Getting The Fans Back In The Stands (Sports, July 11): On professional sports, Marshall McLuhan once said: In sport there is no game without an audience. The greatest game minus an audience is a rehearsal which is quite the opposite of a reply.

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In losing its live spectators, a game loses something essential to its nature, namely its dramatics, its back-and-forth hesitations and heated interactions with other fans. It would no longer be a game we know and love.

Notwithstanding the vast viewing audience, a game on television seems not so much a game as a show the two experiences are not the same. No matter how creative or involving a TV production, I do not believe it can make up for the experience of riding on the roar of the crowd.

Patrick ONeill Toronto

Letters to the Editor should be exclusive to The Globe and Mail. Include your name, address and daytime phone number. Try to keep letters to fewer than 150 words. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. To submit a letter by e-mail, click here: letters@globeandmail.com

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July 18: An entitled world of mostly white privilege. Readers debate WE Charity, free speech and systemic racism, plus other letters to the editor -...

Free speech is under threat and other commentary – New York Post

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Conservative: Will the Backlash Kill Joes Bid?

When the hard-left theorist Noam Chomsky thinks bedrock American principles like free speech are under threat, Matthew Continetti observes in The Washington Free Beacon, it is a sign that ... things have gotten out of control Joe Biden better be paying attention. The wokesters are going too far: Social media has become a system of surveillance, policing and stigma, news media the vehicle for an attack on the American Founding. This could all spell doom for Bidens presidential bid. There is only so much self-abasement a nation can take. And when the winds of woke start to blow, millions of Americans find that there is one way left for them to oppose political correctness: pulling the lever for the man in the White House.

As street violence spikes in big cities across America, writes The Chicago Tribunes John Koss, its becoming clear that Black Lives Matter is a mere political and fundraising arm of the Democratic Party, not the civil-rights movement it claims to be, and its largely young, white and woke supporters cant work up much concern about black children being slaughtered in big-city gang wars. Indeed, even while protesters are shouting loudly and passionately about defunding or abolishing the police, they arent saying a word to pressure big-city Democratic mayors to do anything about the spiking urban violence probably because they live several degrees removed from the killings and see no political advantage for the November elections in drawing attention to them. Thats not cynicism, sadly. Thats reality.

Much of modern social protest is psychological and spiritual need dressed up as revolution, Mark Judge argues at The Stream. Because many young people dont have a grounding principle like religious faith in their lives, theyre easy prey for toxic ideologies, such as Marxism. Thats nothing new: For many believers, Communism became like a father, providing both love and acceptance and a totalizing solution to all the worlds (and each persons) problems. And like their 1960s predecessors, many antifa rioters are really out there looking for their fathers after coming from broken homes. All of these broken souls share the same distant, soulless nihilism and rather than taking up the difficult task of making themselves more whole, they latch on to radical movements.

Kanye Wests recent pledge to remove extraneous chemicals from deodorant makes me like Americas last rock star even more than I did before he announced last Saturday that he was going ahead with his presidential campaign, half-jokes The Weeks Matthew Walther. Would anyone really expect, much less want, Kanye to run on lower taxes and block-granting Medicare to the states? Kudos, too, for his unabashed pro-life stance: At a time when social conservatism is mostly an unedifying series of non-debates about the flag and kneeling, the rapper sounds like Pat Buchanan in 1992, arguing for prayer in public schools and insisting that We have to stop doing things that make God mad. And he sounds more genuine than more conventional conservatives. Whats not to like?

With COVID resurging, warns Dr. Joel Zinberg at City Journal, we must acknowledge data showing that lockdowns themselves contributed to the death toll. If we dont learn from this, doctors will need a new cause of death on death certificates public policy. Economic recession led to increased drug and alcohol abuse and increases in domestic abuse and suicides. Meanwhile, inpatient admissions in Veterans Administration hospitals were down 42 percent for six emergency conditions, including stroke, heart failure and appendicitis, during one six-week period during the pandemic, a change not seen last year. These and deaths from chronic conditions increased because people had to shelter in place, were too scared to go to the doctor or were unable to obtain care. Bottom line: Public-health experts cant go on pretending lockdowns dont kill.

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Free speech is under threat and other commentary - New York Post

Is "cancel culture" really constricting free speech? – The Minefield – ABC News

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Last week, an open letter appeared online under the auspices of Harpers Magazine. It was signed by more than 150 renowned authors and academics across the ideological spectrum and from a remarkable range of disciplines: novelists like Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Khaled Khalifa and J.K. Rowling; historians like Sean Wilentz, David Blight and Mia Bay; philosophers and legal theorists like Samuel Moyn, Zephyr Teachout, Drucilla Cornell and Anthony Kronman; public intellectuals and activists like Noam Chomsky, David Frum and Gloria Steinem; political theorists and sociologists like Yascha Mounk, Melvin Rogers, Uday Mehta, Michael Ignatieff and Francis Fukuyama. Its a list that commands a degree of respect, but its immediately difficult to imagine what could get them all "on the same page" quite literally.

What they collectively raise their voices against is a prevailing "censoriousness", "an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty", which is constricting the "free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society."

While the open letter does not use the term, its signatories are opposing what is often (and derogatively) referred to as "cancel culture". Unsurprisingly, the letter has attracted considerable pushback, and has itself become the topic of vast disagreement. But this, in some ways, sharpens the questions at play: How does liberal democracy manage incommensurable disagreement? Do the moral and political demands for justice and inclusion trump the principles of free expression and open debate? What is the moral status of "opinion"?

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Is "cancel culture" really constricting free speech? - The Minefield - ABC News

The FBI Is Secretly Using A $2 Billion Travel Company As A Global Surveillance Tool – Forbes

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Sabre, a public company on the Nasdaq, has been helping the U.S. government carry out surveillance ... [+] on suspect travellers since 2001. (Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg)

American border patrol already has significant surveillance powers and collects vast amounts of data on who is flying into and out of the country. But the U.S. has another tool to watch over travellers across the world thanks to a little-known but influential Texan business called Sabre. As the biggest of three companies that store the vast majority of the worlds travel informationfrom airline seats to hotel bookings Sabre has been called on to hand over that travellers data and, on at least one occasion, do real-time tracking of a suspect. And, say former employees, the same powerful trove of information could be used to help monitor the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.

To understand how Sabre, which is publicly traded on NASDAQ with a $2 billion plus market cap, came to control such a vast trove of data, you have to go back to the mid-1950s, the very beginnings of what would become the booming - though currently beleaguered - travel industry. In American Airlines offices, bookings staff would take calls sitting at large round tables mounted by a Byzantine-looking contraption: a huge lazy Susan, full of cubbyholes. In each were filed index cards, little records of every separate travel booking, the whole system designed to keep track of who had booked what seat for when. Thanks to predictable human error, it led to inaccurate records, over- and under-booked flights, and peeved travellers who were hoping to explore the world at their leisure in the postwar era of American expansionism and openness.

To make the system more efficient and accurate, American turned to the nascent computer industry, calling on IBM and MIT scientists to build the industrys first passenger name record, a vast database of travel bookings that could be updated and tracked at far greater efficiency. American Airlines dubbed the system the Semi-Automated Business Research Environment and Sabre was born, going live on two IBM mainframes in 1964.

The system worked so well that Sabre would later become its own company and expand to cover other airlines. It would grow further, becoming even more vital to the industry by tracking not just airline bookings but almost anything to do with travel, from the hotel to the rental car. Anyone whos ever booked a holiday will likely have been facilitated by the Texan companys technology. It processes well over a third of all air travel bookings in the world, amounting to more than $260 billion worth of global travel spend annually. Its vast too, with 9,000 employees today (though workers are being laid off and Sabres value has dipped thanks to the severe damage wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic).

Its the biggest of just three players who dominate the hidden connecting tissue of the travel market - known in the industry as global distribution systems - the other two being Madrid-based Amadeus and the British Travelport. Together they sit on huge networks and databases full of information on the worlds travel plans: itineraries, fares, reservations, connecting flights and ticket costs are all there, as are crew schedules and other logistical information.

They have [built] up humongous databases, says Gloria Guevara, former CEO of Sabres Mexican business, now chief executive of the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC). She recalls that when she was at Sabre, between 1995 and 2010, it had one of the top two largest privately-owned databases in the world. They could tell you where [a traveller] came from and the flight that they were on, where they were sitting. Sabre maintains those records, adds Jim Menge, another former Sabre VP from 1994 to 2004.

Publicly, Sabres entanglement with the U.S. government has been apparent for some time. Former CEOs have given testimony to Congressional panels and made it onto presidential committees. Then theres the secret side of the relationship. Stretching back to at least the 2001 September 11 terror attacks, the government has, on numerous occasions, secretly asked the company to actively spy on suspects movements, in both major and minor criminal cases.

For years, the government has asked telecom giants and banks to help track individuals worldwide, whether through tapping calls or sharing the location of bank withdrawals. But with Sabre, it has a particularly powerful snooping option. With financial institutions or the telecoms industry, the government has to go to each separate bank or operator and serve an order on them. It could take a similar approach with the travel industry, asking each airline, hotel and booking agent. But with Sabre, or one of its two chief competitors, it can serve one order to cover all bases. Thats one explanation as to why the company played a role in assisting the U.S. in tracking the movements of the 9/11 hijackers after the attacks on the Twin Towers, as Guevara and Menge tell Forbes. (Sabre didnt respond to requests for comment).

In that case, the government came knocking only after the atrocity had occurred. But, as detailed in one international cybercrime investigation, Sabre can be compelled to proactively watch and report on a persons whereabouts as soon as they start travelling. In an order from December 2019, feds asked Sabre to provide the FBI with real-time updates on the travel activities of a hacking suspect, an Indian fugitive called Deepanshu Kher. Sabre was told to provide complete and contemporaneous real time account activity information of the traveler [Kher] on a weekly basis for six months. Sabre would provide any travel orders, transactions or reservations for the suspect.

Theres little information about Khers case; an indictment from November 2019 simply notes he was charged with attacking the computer hosting a website of an unnamed San Diego company, causing more than $5,000 in damage. Now under home arrest, Kher was apprehended in January and has pleaded not guilty to one charge of intentional damage to a protected computer. (His legal counsel didnt respond to requests for comment. The Justice Department declined to comment.)

The order is one of at least four where Sabre agreed to provide such traveller information. In 2015, the FBI was hunting down Aleksei Yurievich Burkov, whom investigators believed was running Cardplanet, a $20 million bazaar for buying and selling stolen credit card data. To track him down, the U.S. government told not just Sabre, but also the U.K.-based, New York Stock Exchange-listed Travelport to provide records on the Russian. Thats according to a brief note on the court docket (a list of events in the course of a court case) for the Burkov case. Further details are under seal. Burkov was extradited from Israel in November 2019 and pleaded guilty to charges of fraud, identity theft, computer intrusion, wire fraud and money laundering in January.

The latest order on Sabre also notes the company had previously complied with three similar orders to assist in effectuating arrest warrants: two in the Western District of Washington in 2017 and 2019, another in the Northern District of California in 2016. Again, the documents remain under seal.

Legal experts tell Forbes that not only does the Kher order appear unprecedented and disturbing in showing how secretive the snooping operations have been, it is also legally questionable, due to its application of a 1789 law known as the All Writs Act. The law allows the U.S. to force third parties into providing assistance to execute a prior order of the court. Many will remember the Act from its most infamous case in 2016, when the government tried to have Apple unlock an iPhone of the shooter in the San Bernardino terror incident of 2015. In that case Apple fought the government, which eventually stopped chasing the Cupertino company after a hacker found a way onto the iPhone.

Marc Zwillinger, who represented Apple in that case, warns the order threatens to turn Sabre into an agent of law enforcement. It struck me as unusual and excessive I'd be concerned that the government will now use this as a matter of course every time they want to track a fugitive, says Zwillinger, whose past clients also include Yahoo.

The San Bernardino terror attack on December 4, 2015, led to an FBI tussle with Apple over the ... [+] application of an old law called the All Writs Act to force the tech company into helping gain access to the shooter's iPhone. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

He says that if it wants to leverage the All Writs Act, the government has to show a third party is necessary and close enough to the matter at hand. With Sabre, given there were other ways of getting the information on Khers travel, such as records of him entering the U.S. via Customs and Border Protection databases, that necessity was questionable.

There are also questions on the reasonableness of the burden on Sabre, another requirement for All Writs Act orders, he adds. In one particular order, it might not be that burdensome, but once you start to get some volume here, then it really turns Sabre into a sort of government agent every time they want to find a fugitive.

Sabres valuable database could soon go from hunting fugitives to stopping an invisible virus. The same data tap thats been turned on by the FBI could prove a boon for the U.S. government in surveilling the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, providing a constant and accurate record of the movements of global populations. It would be possible, for instance, to see how many people flew to New York from Wuhan, and through which airports they travelled. They can say here's how many people are travelling from China, whether it's nonstop via Japan, via Taiwan, Hawaii, Guam, you know, all of these secondary points back to the US, says Menge.

Sabre hasnt revealed any such plans. Such secrecy only means more questions about how deep Sabre and the U.S. governments ties go and how often the All Writs Act has forced it into becoming an arm of Americas globe-spanning intelligence operations.

No one really knows just how often or widely the government has used the All Writs Act to force companies into surveillance, says Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. As long as the government can get away with secret orders to companies that don't fight back, and judges continue to sign off on the orders the government drafts for them, we won't know.

READ MORE: Inside Americas Secretive $2 Billion Research Hub Collecting Fingerprints From Facebook, Hacking Smartwatches And Fighting Covid-19

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The FBI Is Secretly Using A $2 Billion Travel Company As A Global Surveillance Tool - Forbes