Daily Archives: May 2, 2017

Religious freedom attacked on all sides – Washington Times

Posted: May 2, 2017 at 10:56 pm

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

I believe that God has planted in every heart the desire to live in freedom. So said President George W. Bush in 2004. Leave for another day the debate over whether such a belief is more hopeful than realistic. What we do know: Tyrants and terrorists around the world are persecuting, torturing and slaughtering those whose hearts do desire freedom even the most basic.

Last week, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) issued its annual report covering 37 countries. Thomas Reese, USCIRFs chair, minced no words: The Commission has concluded that the state of affairs for international religious freedom is worsening in both the depth and breadth of violations.

USCIRF is an independent, bipartisan federal government commission. Its task: to monitor religious freedom around the world and offer recommendations to Congress, the secretary of state and the president. Its nine unpaid commissioners are appointed either by the White House or congressional leaders. I currently serve as a commissioner. Let me add: Any opinions expressed in this column are mine, not necessarily those of USCIRF.

As I see it, religious freedom is the seed that must be planted in order for other liberties to have a chance to grow. Governments that fail to secure the natural right to believe (or not believe) as ones conscience dictates, and to worship (or not worship) as one chooses will always repress other liberties freedom of expression, association and assembly among them.

The International Religious Freedom Act, passed in 1998, requires the U.S. government to designate the most egregious violators of religious freedom as countries of particular concern (CPCs). The State Department currently designates 10 CPCs. USCIRFs new report recommends adding six more.

There are an additional 12 countries on USCIRFs Tier 2 list. The rulers of those lands flagrantly violate religious freedom, though not or at least not yet on the level of the CPCs. You wont be surprised to learn that Turkey has been added to that list.

We might call this an embarrassment of wretchedness more nations than the commission can comfortably monitor, certainly more than I can talk about in one column. So let me just hit a few of the lowlights.

The new USCIRF report urges the secretary of State to designate Russia a CPC because new Russian laws have effectively criminalized religious speech not authorized by the state. Most recently, Russia banned the Jehovahs Witnesses, accusing the group of posing a threat to the rights of citizens, public order and public security. Thats both unfair and puzzling: The Jehovahs Witnesses are avowedly apolitical and pacifist.

In China, Uighur Muslims, the Falun Gong and Tibetan Buddhists are among those being persecuted and whose members have been tortured. Last year, in the words of the USCIRF report, Authorities evicted thousands of monks and nuns from the Larung Gar Buddhist Institute in Tibet before demolishing their homes. The Panchen Lama, who should serve as one of the leaders of Tibetan Buddhists, was abducted by the Chinese government when he was six years old. April 25 was his 28th birthday and almost nothing is known about him not even where he is.

In Iran, the most disfavored religious minority is the Bahai, though Christians and Sunni Muslims also are subject to prolonged detention, torture and executions. Since the election of moderate President Hassan Rouhani in 2013, the number of individuals from religious minority communities who are in prison because of their beliefs has increased. Let me introduce you to one: Maryam Naghash Zargaran. A teacher in an orphanage, she dared convert from Islam to Christianity. In 2013, a Revolutionary Court convicted her for propagating against the Islamic regime and collusion intended to harm national security. Shes been incarcerated and mistreated ever since.

In Pakistan, at least 40 individuals have been sentenced to death or are serving life sentences for blasphemy. And in Saudi Arabia, the courts continue to prosecute and imprison individuals for dissent, apostasy, and blasphemy, and a law classifying blasphemy and the promotion of atheism as terrorism has been used to target human rights defenders, among others. Just last week, Ahmad Al-Shamri, a Saudi who declared himself an atheist, was sentenced to death.

A complicating factor with which USCIRF is attempting to grapple: When dealing with political Islam, where does the politics end and the religion begin? To cite one example: In Azerbaijan, a Shia-majority country, the Shia Imam Taleh Bagirov was last year sentenced to prison. Have his human rights been violated? I think so. Has he acted out of religious conviction or political ambition? Thats less clear. And if, as I suspect, he is a follower of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolutionary founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, arent those concepts inextricable?

Finally, there was this new and distressing development last year: The State Department and both houses of Congress officially recognized that a genocidal war was being waged by the Islamic State against Christians, Yazidis and some Muslim communities as well.

There is no more lethal threat to religious liberty than genocide. Religious communities can endure oppression for centuries and then flourish again when the jackboot is lifted. But extermination is forever.

USCIRFs commissioners have voted to make genocide a priority; to begin to consider how genocide might be more effectively addressed by the United States and what we call, perhaps more hopefully than realistically, the international community.

Military force is now being used to dislodge the Islamic State from the lands it had conquered. Thats necessary. But much more will need to be done if the ancient religious minorities of the Middle East are to make it out of this decade alive.

Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a columnist for The Washington Times.

Go here to read the rest:

Religious freedom attacked on all sides - Washington Times

Posted in Freedom | Comments Off

How Trump is undermining press freedom around the world – Washington Post

Posted: at 10:56 pm

By Michael J. Abramowitz and Arch Puddington By Michael J. Abramowitz and Arch Puddington May 2 at 9:00 AM

Global press freedom has long been in decline and is now at its lowest point in the past 13 years, according to Freedom Houses latest assessment, released last week. What is new, and especially disquieting, are the mounting pressures on the media in the United States, including sharp attacks on reporters by the Trump administration. This raises the question of whether Americawill continue to serve as a model for other countries.

The United States remains an oasis, one of the few places in the world where aggressive journalistic investigation can be practiced with few legal restrictions and little physical danger to reporters. But even here, press freedom has been weakening for some time, well before the inauguration of Donald Trump.

Recent administrations have battled the press, even threatening some reporters with jail time for refusing to identify sources. An entire news organization (Gawker) was wiped out because of a successful lawsuit funded by a billionaire. Meanwhile, outlets that profess to be legitimate news media but are in fact propaganda instruments hold the ideals of neutrality and honest reporting in disdain.

Since Trumps rise to the presidency, however, matters have taken a turn for the worse. The new White House derides and belittles journalists and media organizations in the hope of undermining the credibility of the press. In so doing, the administration is aggressively promoting the notion that nuance and facts are irrelevant a staple concept of Russian information warfare.

No president in recent memory has forged a record of such unrelenting scorn for the media, and at such an early stage in an administration, as has President Trump. In so doing, the administration provides welcome ammunition to those in other countries working both to destroy independent media in their own societies and to undermine the principle that freedom of thought and open access to information are the rights of all people, everywhere.

Russia and China represent the vanguard in the war against press freedom worldwide. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have intensified restrictions on their own journalists, leading to a string of murders in Russia and prosecutions in China. Both governments have also tried to shape the global media environment through propaganda and, in the case of China, a campaign to destroy the very concept of a global Internet. Its harder for the United States to meaningfully condemn such actions if its administration maintains that fact-based journalists are the enemy of the American people.

Authoritarian rulers in countries as diverse as Venezuela, Turkey and Ethiopia are mimicking the Moscow-Beijing playbook, throwing reporters in jail, subjecting them to violence, and suppressing Internet freedom and social media. In all these cases, Trump and his entourage have either remained silent or actively abetted bad behavior. (Turkey, to name but one example, now accounts for one-third of the worlds imprisoned journalists yet that didnt stop Trump from congratulating Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his recent victory in a constitutional referendum that entailed a broad crackdown on the media.)

Equally disturbing are recent setbacks in democracies such as Hungary and Poland, where the decline in press freedom has been accomplished with remarkable speed. Polands Law and Justice party government is systematically undermining the independent media, asserting control over public broadcasters. In Hungary, the ruling Fidesz party has gradually warped the media sector in its favor through politicized ownership changes and the closure of critical outlets. Both countries, members of the European Union and NATO, are allies of the United States. Yet Washington is doing nothing to make its influence felt.

The United States will not necessarily follow the path of those faltering democracies, much less of Russia and China. Compared with many other democracies, the United States has stronger constitutional guarantees of press freedom and freedom of speech, and more robust legislative and judicial systems with records of independence in the face of executive overreach.

The danger is that the new U.S. leadership may, in effect, be offering a license to governments elsewhere that have cracked down on the media as part of a more ambitious authoritarian strategy. There is little doubt that autocrats everywhere are watching what the United States does and what its new president says. The duty of the press is to hold government accountable, not be its spokesperson or propaganda arm. The government has a duty to respect that obligation.

When political figures in the United States deride the media for helping citizens hold their government accountable, they encourage foreign leaders with autocratic goals to do the same. When U.S. officials step back from promoting democracy and press freedom, journalists beyond American shores feel the chill. A weakening of press freedom in the United States would be a setback for freedom everywhere.

More here:

How Trump is undermining press freedom around the world - Washington Post

Posted in Freedom | Comments Off

Find Your "Pocket of Freedom" to Make Long Commutes More Bearable – Lifehacker

Posted: at 10:56 pm

Commutes are frustrating because they make us feel like we dont have any control. Youre either trapped on a bus or train, or trapped in a car crawling along the freeway. But if you focus on what you can control, your time heading to and from work can become the best, most enriching parts of your day.

To make the most of your commute, researchers at Harvard Business Review suggest you look at that travel time from a different perspective. It doesnt have to be the waste you might see it as. You may be confined while you go from home to work and vice versa, but the time itself is still yours. Yours to read a book, or listen to a podcast, or better yet, treat it as Ph.D. candidate Jon M. Jachimowiczs great-aunt would call a pocket of freedom:

We borrowed the phrase pocket of freedom from Adela, the great-aunt of one of us (Jon), whose early adult years were spent in various Polish ghettos during the Nazi occupation. No matter how hungry, tired, or frightened she was, she devoted one hour each night to a creative activity with her niecea practice that, she later noted, helped her persevere. Though the stakes in a commute to work are much less significant, you, too, can make the time more bearable by thinking of it as an opportunity to pursue your passions.

Adelas coping strategy, while born from a far greater struggle than any commute, is still useful advice for the rest of us, and is supported by science. Research has suggested a correlation between higher levels of autonomy and greater well-being for years. Being able to choose how you use your time often leads to greater satisfaction, productivity, and lower stress levels throughout the day. Its not so much about what you do with these pockets, you see, its that you choose to take control and do something.

Every commute is an opportunity, so start looking at it as a blessing and not a curse. Youve been given a small chunk of freedom to be creative, pursue a passion, learn a new skill, or listen to some soothing music so you can decompress before going home to a busy family. How will you use your pockets of freedom?

Visit link:

Find Your "Pocket of Freedom" to Make Long Commutes More Bearable - Lifehacker

Posted in Freedom | Comments Off

GOP’s Internet Freedom Act permanently guts net neutrality authority – Ars Technica

Posted: at 10:56 pm

Getty Images | Chris Clor

Nine Republican US senators yesterday submitted legislation that would prohibitthe Federal Communications Commission from ever againusing the regulatory authority that allowed the commission to imposenet neutrality rules.The "Restoring Internet Freedom Act" would prohibit the FCC from classifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act and "from imposing certain regulations on providers of such service."

The Internet "is threatened by the Federal Communications Commissions 2015 Open Internet Order, which would put federal bureaucrats in charge of engineering the Internets infrastructure," Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). said in an announcement yesterday. "That is why I am introducing the Restoring Internet Freedom Act, which would nullify [the] Open Internet Order and prohibit the FCC from issuing a similar rule in the future.

Lee's bill was co-sponsored bySens. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), and James Inhofe (R-Ok.). In the announcement, Cruz repeated his charge that net neutrality is "Obamacare for the Internet."

The full bill text isn't available yet, but itappears to be identical to another one proposedlast year. That bill would have prohibited the FCC from issuinga new net neutrality rule"unless the rule is specifically authorized by a law enacted after enactment of this Act." There was also an "Internet Freedom Act" to wipe out net neutrality rules in 2015.

The FCC attempted to impose net neutrality rules without using its Title II authority in 2010, but Verizon sued and the rules were struck down in court. The FCC finally was able to impose net neutrality rules that were upheld in courtafter reclassifying ISPs as common carriers. Among other things, the rules prohibit ISPs from blocking, throttling, or prioritizing Internet websites and applications in exchange for payment. The latest court decision upholding the current net neutrality rules was alsoissued yesterday.

Meanwhile, the FCC's new Republican chairman, Ajit Pai, has proposed overturning the Title II classification and net neutrality rules in his own "Restoring Internet Freedom" plan.Some Republicans in Congress support net neutrality legislationthat wouldban blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization of Internet traffic without using Title II. But from what we know about Lee's bill so far, it appears the proposal wouldn't impose any typeof net neutrality rules to replace the current ones.

Read the original:

GOP's Internet Freedom Act permanently guts net neutrality authority - Ars Technica

Posted in Freedom | Comments Off

Trump and GOP, not campus radicals, pose the real threat to freedom – Chicago Tribune

Posted: at 10:56 pm

Oh, please.

The ignorant, insular snowflakes on college campuses who want to banish conservative speakers are a piddly threat to American liberty.

The hand-wringing and pearl-clutching on the political right about the lefty activists who object to their schools providing a forum to conservative provocateurs is preposterously out of scale to the danger these activists actually pose to the First Amendment.

Snarky firebrand Ann Coulter should have been allowed to speak as scheduled at the University of California at Berkeley, agreed. And the frightening, stifling campus protests to which other conservative speakers have been subjected are inexcusable, particularly at institutions supposedly dedicated to inquiry and freedom of thought.

But come out from under the covers. Put on some fresh trousers. The vast majority of liberal politicians and pundits deplore this sort of suppression, which remains geographically quite limited. Rascals and rabble rousers from all across the political spectrum still have countless venues for expression, and those who wish to enjoy the vile ramblings of, say, Milo Yiannopolous, have no shortage of opportunity online.

The right dominates talk radio and cable chat, and Republicans control every branch of government at the federal level.

Freedom of conservative speech is very, very safe.

A better argument can be made that it's President Donald Trump and the GOP who are the true threats to American liberty.

On March 30, Trump tweeted "The failing @nytimes has disgraced the media world. Gotten me wrong for two solid years. Change libel laws?" This echoed what he'd promised a year earlier on the campaign trail, "I'm going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money."

The laws on the books say a public figure must establish that a media outlet acted with "actual malice" in order to prove libel. Relaxing that standard would have a deeply chilling effect not only on major media outlets but also everyday citizens, since social media has turned all of us into publishers.

In fact, the chilling effect would be greatest on everyday citizens, since so few have armies of lawyers to defend themselves against aggrieved politicians.

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus said Sunday that pursuing such a change to the definition of libel "is something that is being looked at" by the Trump administration.

In the same interview on ABC's "This Week," Priebus was asked about a related Trump tweet on Nov. 29: "Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag if they do, there must be consequences perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!"

"It's something that, again, is probably going to get looked at," Priebus said. "Our flag should be protected, and it's Donald Trump that talks about that issue. And you know what? It's a 70 percent issue in this country. He wins every day and twice on Sunday on our flag."

Not quite. The most recent scientific poll I could find, a 2011 survey by the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University and the Newseum, found just 39 percent support for a constitutional amendment to overrule the Supreme Court's finding that burning an American flag in protest is protected expression.

Yes, it's a form of expression that deeply offends many people. So is the sneering, sexist, racist claptrap from would-be campus orators. On principle I defend both forms of expression. But only the former is under threat by the president of the United States.

Fortunately, Trump's impulses to amend the Constitution to clamp down on the media and on other forms of expression he detests will be thwarted by the difficulty of passing such amendments absent an overwhelming national political consensus. Deep breaths, everyone. Free speech is safe.

For genuine threats to the core values of our democratic republic, however, you need look no further than the relentless, state-by-state efforts of the GOP to suppress minority voting. Just last month, a federal judge invalidated Texas' 2011 voter identification law on the grounds that the intent of legislators was to discriminate against black and Hispanic voters, not to combat almost nonexistent in-person voter fraud.

Similarly, a federal court struck down North Carolina's voter ID law last summer, writing that the statute targeted "African-Americans with almost surgical precision" due to the legislature's blatant "concern that African-Americans, who had overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, had too much access to the franchise."

Shame on the those who try to deny provocative speakers the right to speak to willing campus audiences. But really. The threat they pose to liberty pales next to those engaged in campaigns of voter suppression as our peevish president hungrily looks to carve up the Constitution.

Twitter @EricZorn

Mr. President, come out of your safe space

The threat Donald Trump poses to democracy is not overblown

What Donald Trump is doing isn't normal

Can Donald Trump save his failing presidency?

See the article here:

Trump and GOP, not campus radicals, pose the real threat to freedom - Chicago Tribune

Posted in Freedom | Comments Off

Alarm over worsening press freedom in Tunisia – Yahoo News

Posted: at 10:56 pm

Twenty-five associations, including the Tunisian Press Syndicate, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and Amnesty International, said they were "deeply concerned" about the creation of a regulatory body for audiovisual communication (AFP Photo/FETHI BELAID)

Tunis (AFP) - Tunisian and international non-governmental organisations warned Tuesday of deteriorating freedom of the press in a country considered to be a rare success story of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings.

"The Tunisian government these past weeks has not stopped tightening its grip on the press," they said in a joint statement published on World Press Freedom Day.

Six years after a popular uprising toppled longtime dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the rights groups expressed concern about the recent banning of a small daily publication.

"It's the first time since the end of the dictatorship... that a newspaper is banned in this way," they said.

The Tunisian authorities did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Tunisian media was largely silenced under Ben Ali.

But the 2011 uprising gave rise to unprecedented freedom of expression in Tunisia. The country ranked first in North Africa in RSF's latest World Press Freedom Index.

Amnesty also published a separate statement on Tuesday in which it urged Tunisia to "demonstrate its commitment to human rights", especially in stemming torture and gender-based discrimination.

"While Tunisia has made some progress on opening up political and civil space and some legislative reforms have been introduced, the security sector has remained largely unchanged and in recent years there has been a resurgence of violations committed with impunity," said Heba Morayef, Amnesty's North Africa research director.

The UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday reviewed the human rights situation in Tunisia for the first time since 2012.

"This review comes at a critical moment for Tunisia," said Morayef.

"It provides a crucial opportunity to take stock of where Tunisia's transition stands in terms of human rights reforms six years on from the uprising and in the face of ongoing security challenges."

See the original post:

Alarm over worsening press freedom in Tunisia - Yahoo News

Posted in Freedom | Comments Off

Technology Guru Bill Joy Is Betting on a Bulletproof Battery – Bloomberg

Posted: at 10:55 pm

Bill Joy, in 2003.

Bill Joy, the Silicon Valley guru and Sun Microsystems Inc. co-founder, sees the future of energy in a battery that can take a bullet.

The venture capitalist formerly with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers LLC is now dedicating most of his time to Ionic Materials Inc., a Woburn, Massachusetts-based startup developing lithium batteries that wont burst into flames. Theyre strong enough to withstand being pierced by nails and even getting shot, as the company demonstrates in a promotional video.

The effort is part of a global race to devise better storage systems for hand-held devices, cars, trucks and electrical grids. The problem is conventional lithium-ion batteries contain liquid electrolytes that wear out quickly and have a nasty habit of spontaneously combusting, sometimes aboard jetliners. Ionic Materials says its solved those problems by crafting batteries from a solid plastic-like material.

If you can make the battery out of a solid, these problems essentially disappear, Joy said in a phone interview, speaking from a boat in the South Pacific. Its really a breakthrough in cost, safety and performance.

Quick Take: Read more about headaches with lithium-ion batteries.

That could fill a need, said Yayoi Sekine, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Safer stationary storage batteries are definitely welcome in the industry, she said by email.

Joy, who was chief scientist at Sun Microsystems until 2003, first toyed with the notion of a solid battery about 10 years ago when he and colleagues at Kleiner Perkins came up with a list of grand challenges.

The idea was to imagine the technological breakthroughs that could change the world. For example, what if concrete could be made without producing carbon dioxide? Could sugar be extracted from wood chips and other non-edible plant scraps and made into biofuel? And is it possible to develop a battery without volatile liquid electrolytes?

With a list of transformative ideas in hand, Joy and his colleagues scoured laboratories, universities and beyond looking for scientists on the cusp of solving any of these grand challenges. If everything penciled out, Kleiner Perkins would invest.

Thats a different approach than most venture people, Joy said. They typically have people knock on their door and give them story pitches. We went out and looked.

Joy and his partners came up with about 25 grand challenges and found about 15 projects to fund. About half of those have evolved into viable businesses. They include Renmatix Inc., a biofuel company that received $14 million in funding last year from investors led by Bill Gates and the French oil giant Total SA.

The answer to Joys solid-state battery questions came viaMike Zimmerman, aTufts University professor and Bell Laboratories veteran who was already working on the technology and foundedIonic Materials in 2011. Joy sponsored an initial Kleiner Perkins investment that year. He has since invested personally in the company and sits on its board. My major commitment right now is helping with Ionic, Joy said.

It wont be easy. The energy-storage market is crowded with companies and researchers pushing to come up with technology to dethrone conventional lithium-ion batteries.

The most important business stories of the day.

Get Bloomberg's daily newsletter.

Ionic Materials has about 25 employees, and its working to scale up production. Manufacturing may begin within two to three years, Zimmerman said. The company plans to bring the cost of its batteries down as low as $30 per kilowatt-hour within about five years -- significantly below the current $273volume weighted average cost of lithium-ion battery packs calculatedby Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

You will see this technology widely adopted, in everything from consumer electronics, to transportation to energy storage for the grid, Joy said. Weve been pretty quiet about what weve got, but this can radically transform things.

Read the original:

Technology Guru Bill Joy Is Betting on a Bulletproof Battery - Bloomberg

Posted in Technology | Comments Off

Flying cars and ‘the technology of tomorrow’ today – seattlepi.com

Posted: at 10:55 pm

By Stephen Cohen, SeattlePI

Photo: VALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images

It may still be a while before flying cars, like this Aeromobil model revealed last month in Monaco, are ready for the public, and even then they may be reserved for the uber-rich. Perhaps the biggest issue will be figuring out where, when and how they will be able to take to the skies in compliance with government regulations.

Speaking of Uber, the ride-sharing company has been one of the industry leaders when it comes to self-driving cars, but its program had to be shut down briefly after a crash in Tempe, Arizona, in March. Apple, Google and Samsung are all working on their own versions of the driver-less vehicles.

If mass transit is more your thing, high-speed rail keeps on getting better and better. The world's first bullet trainopened in Japan in the mid-1960s and traveled at a top speed of 130 mph, but Shanghai's Maglev -- a magnetic levitation train -- can go more than twice as fast.

Looking further afield, the countdown to widespreadprivate spaceflight appears alreadyto have begun. Companies like Blue Origin, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic (whose founder, Richard Branson, is shown here with the SpaceShip Two VSS Unity in 2016) could start ferrying consumers out of this world in the next few years.

If keeping things compact is more your style, a jet pack (like this one used by "Rocket Man" during a Texas football game in 2014) might be the thing, but it doesn't seem close to being a legitimate form of personal transportation.

The water-powered jet pack, however, looks like a lot of fun.

Hoverboards are nothing like what we were led to believe in "Back to the Future," as evidenced here by Jennifer Lopez's dancers on their versions, which are really just motorized, two-wheeled, sideways skateboards (and are also prone to spontaneously catch fire).

However, there are some legitimate hoverboard options in development, like the Fly Board Air, which designer Franky Zapata rode for a world-record 7,388 feet on April 30, 2016 in Marseille, France.

We're still nowhere with time machines. Thanks for nothing, science.

Artificial intelligence has allowed for the proliferation of smart homes, like this package from Sky that uses "information from the company's various smart home devices to learn homeowners' habits to then automatically set things like the thermostat, lighting and locks and will check in with users before performing certain functions."

You could eventually fill your smart home with all sorts of futuristic items, like Buddy, the companion robot from Blue Frog Robotics. He might be part home security system, part smartphone and part adorable-looking toy, but it will never wisecrack as well as Rosie from "The Jetsons."

You could eventually fill your smart home with all sorts of futuristic items, like Buddy, the companion robot from Blue Frog Robotics. He might be part home security system, part smartphone and part

Not only can you plan trips and get directions using aGPS-enabled device like your smartphone, games like "Pokemon Go" gave users the opportunity to capture imaginary monsters while running into other people on the sidewalk.

And while virtual reality hasn't become the kind of ever-present, computer-generated wonderland we all thought it might be in the 1990s, heavyweights such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Sony are all developing their own VR-related products.

Flying cars and 'the technology of tomorrow' today

People have been dreaming of flying cars since shortly after the invention of actual cars. It's said Henry Ford himself predicted the combination of automobile and airplane back in 1940.

Well, we have some good news. It may have taken longer than Ford expected, but the flying car is finally a reality.

Sort of ... maybe ...

Kitty Hawk, a Silicon Valley startup backed by Google co-founder Larry Page, was among the flying-car companies profiled in The New York Times last week. There's even some footage of the company's "Flyer" prototype, which looks a little bit like a Jet Ski mated with a drone. According to the piece, the company hopes to start selling to consumers by the end of the year.

"We've all had dreams of flying effortlessly," Page said in a statement to the Times. "I'm excited that one day very soon I'll be able to climb onto my Kitty Hawk Flyer for a quick and easy personal flight."

There are, admittedly, a lot of issues that will need to be sorted out before flying cars become the next big thing, including noise and safety concerns, as well as the development of a potential air-traffic control system designed to handle an influx of consumer-driven aircraft.

But even if it doesn't look like you'll be able to park your very own flying car in your driveway (or helipad or runway) any time in the near future, it got us thinking about other technological advancements that seemed like science fiction only a few decades ago -- say, when Seattle hosted the World's Fair in 1962 -- that are a reality (or close to it) today.

Check out the gallery above to see how close -- or how far away -- some of the technology of tomorrow is today.

Visit seattlepi.com for more Seattle news. Contact reporter Stephen Cohen at stephencohen@seattlepi.com or @scohenPI.

Go here to see the original:

Flying cars and 'the technology of tomorrow' today - seattlepi.com

Posted in Technology | Comments Off

FAA Testing New Drone-Sensing Technology to Avoid Airport Collisions – Government Technology

Posted: at 10:55 pm

(TNS) -- On Aug. 31, the pilot of an American Airlines Boeing 777 arriving from Hong Kong spotted a white, diamond-shaped drone as the aircraft made its final descent into DFW International Airport.

The drone was 100 feet below and 100 feet to the right of the plane, according to a Federal Aviation Administration report, and didnt require any evasive action. The plane landed safely, but airport police were notified about the drones unauthorized intrusion into the airspace, one of 44 reported at North Texas airports through the first nine months of 2016.

None of the cases resulted in planes being struck and just one, a small Beechcraft plane, had to alter its flight course to avoid a collision at an elevation of 10,500 feet near DFW Airport.

But airport officials and U.S. aviation regulators are increasingly worried about potentially catastrophic encounters as drones become more widely used by businesses and hobbyists.

The bottom line is that anyone who flies a drone in and around the airspace near airports can pose a serious safety risk, said Michael OHarra, said Michael OHarra, a deputy regional administrator for the FAA.

For the last week, the FAA and several partners have been testing new technology at DFW Airport thats meant to quickly identify drones in restricted airspace.

The tests are set up like a high-tech game of hide and seek, with a team of operators flying a drone on the west side of the airport, while engineers for Gryphon Sensors use a combination of radar, radio-frequency and optical sensors to identify and ultimately pinpoint the aircraft.

The tests at DFW are the sixth and final in a series of tests around the country evaluating different technologies for drone detection.

OHarra said DFW Airport, which has about 1,800 daily take offs and landings, provided an ideal place to test the technologies in a heavily congested airspace. One of many challenges facing the sensors is being able to differentiate between unauthorized drones; other, authorized aircraft and even non-aircraft objects like wildlife or stray plastic bags blowing in the wind.

The research also allows the FAA to compare different proposed system, gauge how many sensors would be needed to monitor a given area and see what combination of different sensors provide the quickest and most accurate detection.

The FAA recorded about 1,800 reports of unmanned drones, or sometimes model planes, in 2016, relying for now on visual sightings by pilots or people on the ground. Thats up 50 percent from the roughly 1,200 sightings reported in 2015, a trend that FAA officials expect will continue as drones become more widespread.

We believe that most people who fly drones for fun or those who do so for commercial purposes intend to fly those drones safely, OHarra said. Some people dont understand exactly what flying safely means.

Hobbyists are not allowed to operate drones within five miles of an airport unless theyve received permission from airport and air traffic control officials.

Civil penalties for operating near an airport can range up to a fine of $27,500, according to an FAA official.

The testing being done at DFW and other airports is only the beginning stages of eventually incorporating these types of drone-detecting systems across the country. Researchers will analyze the data gathered and use it to develop minimum standards detection systems should meet.

From there, airport officials and regulators would still have to figure out how the systems would be incorporated into an airspace, who would be responsible for responding when a drone is identified and ultimately who would pay to install the technology.

The work represents a small but critical step toward safely incorporating more drones into the airspace.

We dont want pilots coming unexpectedly across a drone. You could run into impact issues...quite frankly it could be a distraction to the pilot if they werent expecting to see it. Were concerned about anything that could take the pilot's attention away from the flight theyre operating.

2017 The Dallas Morning News Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

FAA Testing New Drone-Sensing Technology to Avoid Airport Collisions - Government Technology

Posted in Technology | Comments Off

Have These Researchers Created An Unbeatable Ad-Blocking Technology? – Fast Company

Posted: at 10:55 pm

By Glenn Fleishman 05.02.17 | 8:00 am

Heres the thing about an ad: If you cant recognize it, its worth nothing to the advertiser. Thats the fatal flaw with web-based ads. No matter how much ad technology evades ad-blocking software by disguising itself, it still has to be recognizable to a user and potentially clickable.

Researchers at Princeton and Stanford believe they have shown how to end the escalating blocker/anti-blocker battle as a result of that crucial point, and in favor of user choice. While a war to win our eyeballs sounds like the theme of a Guillermo del Toro film, it describes the interplay between advertisers (and ad-technology companies) and the visitors who reject the panoply of tracking techniques and page bloat that come with current online ads.

Some sites go beyond just trying to route around blocking techniques used by Ghostery, AdBlock Plus, and others by showing a scolding message when they detect blocking action in use. A visitor often has to disable an ad blocker or add a rules exception to proceed to a site. But Princeton and Stanfords academics have determined its possible to identify ads with an extremely high degree of reliability without using any of the current ad-blocking tricks of identifying underlying page elements, domains, and the like, and also block counter-defenses from sites and adtech companies.

In a paper currently in draft form, the authors detail an interlocking set of theory, code, and legal reasoning about the state of ad blocking and the response by ad networks and site publishers. Its been assumed that the blocking and anti-blocking war would escalate indefinitely, with battles fought as a series of measures and countermeasures. The researchers lay out the case that browser users and browser makers have the upper hand, and that in any given skirmish, publishers will quickly lose.

Instead of looking at network and code, the proof of concept the authors first deployed as a Chrome plug-inwhich identifies ads on Facebookuses computer vision, optical-character recognition of text rendered as images, and other cues. It allows ads to load and scripts to run, at which point it can determine what on a page is an ad.

To discourage robots from automatically filling them out, text-based CAPTCHAs became ever more baroque to avoid scripts puzzling out the results, to the point where they frustrated many users as well as the bots. That cant work with ads; it even stopped working with CAPTCHAs, as scammers adopted deep-learning computer vision techniques. So long as advertisements, even malicious advertisements, are recognizable by users, you should be able to use these techniques to find them, says Grant Storey, a Princeton undergraduate in computer science who coauthored the paper with Arvind Narayanan and Dillon Reisman of Princeton and Jonathan Mayer of Stanford. (Mayer is currently at work in the FCCs enforcement bureau as chief technologist.)

Their approach relies in part on legitimate advertisers, ad networks, and publishers complying with U.S. regulations and with guidelines forindustry self-monitoring. Reputable ads have labels and other attributesthat make them stand out. It might be subtle to a user, but its obvious to a trained machine-learning system. (Other countries vary in their practices, though some have even stricter laws and industry self-monitoring.)

As the researchers note, In order to defeat a filter list [such as is used by conventional ad blockers], all that is required is moving an advertisement to a different URL; in order to defeat a perceptual ad blocker, an entirely new ad disclosure standard must be approved. The researchers limited their testing to ads on Facebook pages and ads that comply with regulations and industry practice. For this paper, our focus was on this well-behaved universe, where there are certain sort of norms that are being followed, Storey says.

The researchers system is modular and adaptable, and could be trained to recognize unlabeled ads, although the researchers have found that over time more advertising on more sites has proper labels and disclosure. Their framework doesnt encompass malvertising, or the delivery of malware via ads. Anti-malware, Google Safe Browsing, and other software and services better handle that separate from identifying them as ads. Nor does it block the trackers that are often part of ad serving, but are a concern because of privacy issues rather than than visual interaction.

In their testing, the Facebook extension, in the field for several months, matched 50 out of 50 ads, including those in both the news feed and sidebars. The four researchers also report they saw no false negatives or positives in their personal use over six months.

On the broader web, they tested a module that looks for disclosures under the AdChoices program, used in North America and Europe, and which the papers authors found was used in over 60% of ads in a sample of 183 ads from top news websites. Their AdChoices module correctly labeled over 95% of AdChoices ads from 100 sites randomly selected from the top 500 news sites.

The researchers technology could create a beneficial feedback loop, too, as users who might employ ad-detection software could complain to advertisers, sites, ad networks, state attorneys general, trade groups, and the FTC about commercial messages that were identifiable as out of compliance with regulations and industry guidelines. (In fact, this approach could be automated by nonprofit and governmental consumer-protection groups to identify out-of-compliance ads.)

On top of ad identification, the paper offers a further step in dampening the powder on the adtech side of this battle. Because the technology the researchers tested comes in the form of a browser extension, it has privileges that extend far beyond what JavaScript code can do in a browser. That allows developers to turn a loaded web page into a kind of brain in a jar, which they label a rootkit, because of its advantageous position in the browser. The researchers can use this fact to prevent anti-blocking software from determining whether an ad blocker is in use, even if the software detects thatits been sandboxed.

And, with a similar approach, the researchers tested whether its possible to create a differential examination of a page, by loading it once and applying ad blocking and then loading a shadow version that executes all page-modifying JavaScript code. The two versions could be compared to see if anti-ad blocking messages or changes took place. By figuring out what elements are being tracked, the extension could return responses that the publisher would expect only from a page showing its ads, thereby allowing it to block ads without detection. (The authors didnt implement this in code, but tested whether it would be effective.)

These techniques, and another exploration into blocking the execution of anti-blocking code altogether, raise ethical concerns thatare addressed briefly in the paper, because such tools could be used in advertising fraud, a large industry in which automated scripts attempt to rack up page views and perform clicks while appearing to be legitimate actions by humans.

The research might offer more insight to fraudsters in preventing detection by using extensions, but, Storey notes, there are still other ways to detect the ad-fraud bot that should available and these techniques dont work for fraud systems that load in a browser. The researchers also omitted a few details to prevent releasing full details on their technique.

The brain-a-in-jar method could be escalated further if browser makers go further and either provide deeper access for extension creators or build in ad blocking directly. Google reportedly is considering changes to Chrome that would prevent certain kinds of irritating ads from loading or bar all ads from loading on pages that use any of those forms of irritating ads.

The only way to win most wars is to avoid conflict in the first place. As web-ad revenue has slipped away to Facebook, Twitter, and mobile apps, among other places, publishers have developed adtech or signed up with networks that offer it. Thats led to heavier use of invasive techniques such as pop-up ads with hard-to-click Xs to close and auto-play video, as well as large downloads for the web code to support them.

JPMorgan Chase recently discovered that automated advertising on 400,000 sites brought clicks only from 12,000. It winnowed that list to 5,000 handpicked sites and saw no overall change in results. That would indicate that aggressive techniques to deliver ads to users arent working for advertisers, either.

Princeton and Stanfords research, combined with results like those from Chase, might force publishers to rethink ad approaches entirely. That could lead them to back out of the blocking/anti-blocking situation, finding a way to attract users into viewing well-behaved marketing and leaving the tricks behind.

Glenn Fleishman is a veteran technology reporter based in Seattle, who covers security, privacy, and the intersection of technology with culture. Since the mid-1990s, Glenn has written for a host of publications, including the Economist, Macworld, the New York Times, and Wired.

See the original post here:

Have These Researchers Created An Unbeatable Ad-Blocking Technology? - Fast Company

Posted in Technology | Comments Off

Daily Archives: May 2, 2017

Religious freedom attacked on all sides – Washington Times

How Trump is undermining press freedom around the world – Washington Post

Find Your "Pocket of Freedom" to Make Long Commutes More Bearable – Lifehacker

GOP’s Internet Freedom Act permanently guts net neutrality authority – Ars Technica

Trump and GOP, not campus radicals, pose the real threat to freedom – Chicago Tribune

Alarm over worsening press freedom in Tunisia – Yahoo News

Technology Guru Bill Joy Is Betting on a Bulletproof Battery – Bloomberg

Flying cars and ‘the technology of tomorrow’ today – seattlepi.com

FAA Testing New Drone-Sensing Technology to Avoid Airport Collisions – Government Technology

Have These Researchers Created An Unbeatable Ad-Blocking Technology? – Fast Company

The Prometheus League

Breaking News and Updates

Prometheism

Forbidden Fruit

The Evolutionary Perspective

Transtopia Menu

Library Updates

Library Books

Future Euvolution

Lucid Dreams from Childhood

Genetic Revolution

Speciation + Self-Directed Evolution