Category Archives: Technology

USA TODAY premieres the new trailer for The Circle, starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks and based on Dave Eggers best-selling novel.

Emma Watson plays Mae, a young employee who gets way more than she bargained for (and way behind on her technology) at The Circle.(Photo: Frank Masi, STX Entertainment)

It isn't easy to make a movie about technology taking over/ruining the world particularly because it takes at least two years to get a movie from script to screen, allowingSilicon Valley time to create the very thing that futuristic films are trying to warn us about.

Suchis thefate that befalls The Circle, a new drama (in theaters Friday)based on Dave Eggers' 2013 novel. The movie starsTom Hanks as Eamon Bailey, aSteve Jobs-esque tech CEO, and Emma Watson as Mae, a freshman employee at The Circle who gets in over her head. Only problem is,the scariest parts of The Circle are already happening. Lets explore.

Tom Hanks stars as CEO of The Circle (which bears a familiar logo seen on his coffee cup and the wall behind him).(Photo: Frank Masi, STX Entertainment)

For starters, the company logo

The logo for The Circle, an Apple/Google/Facebook hybrid company, is a circle with a line sliced out of it. Funny, thats almost exactly the shape Uber replaced its old logo with early last year, just flipped 180degrees.

Futuristic points: 0 (scale of 1 to 5)

Behold, the year-old new Uber logo.(Photo: Lionel Bonaventure, AFP/Getty Images)

High-tech medical bracelets

Mae and her family sign up for the company medical plan, which is super-advanced and helps with her father's multiple sclerosis. But The Circle slaps a metal bracelet on her wrist, which tracks her intravenous system, her heart rateand her overall health. Sounds a lot like, um, an Apple Watch. Or health insurance-sponsored Fitbits, now a common perk at companies that offer incentives toward weekly step counts (tracking employee movement through programs like Walkadoo). But we'll allowa few points for advancement, as our smartwatches have yet tocure us.

Futuristic points: 3

Check out the medical device in 'The Circle.' Will our Apple Watches look like this in the future?(Photo: Frank Masi, STX Entertainment)

'Optional' socialization

Employees at The Circle are coerced into socializing their entire day:what theyre interested in, how theyre feeling, what their plans are. The dark side, of course, is that none of that information actually belongs to them anymore. This debate is already raging, not just forthe millions glued to Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram, but also for those who are simply scrolling through Amazon Prime on their computers.Thanks to Donald Trump's recent rollback ofInternet privacy rules passed last year by the Federal Communications Commission, it's now legal for Internet providers to sell customers'information including their search histories. Welcome to the future.

Futuristic points: 0

One account for everything

In The Circle, Eamon artfully debuts TruYou, a service that ties together all of your bank and credit card accounts into one, with a single password. Remember that time you paid for groceries with Apple Pay? Were getting pretty darn close.

Futuristic points: 1, for imagining a world in which we all don't juggle 10 passwords

Tom Hanks debuts live video broadcast from tiny unwired cameras. Imagine that.(Photo: STX Entertainment)

Livecasting your every move

After fully drinking the company Kool-Aid, Mae decides to clipa camera to her shirt andlive broadcasther entire life, morning to night. Which you can now do on Facebook Live and Instagram Live, for better or worse.

Futuristic points: 0

At least the little cameras are cute.(Photo: Frank Masi)

Eyes that watch us around the world

A cool feature introduced by Eamon is a marble-sizecamera that devotees can stickanywhere, turning the world into one giant livecast. Were not entirely at the stalker-level cameras imagined by The Circle yet, but between satellite images, omnipresent security cameras and easily hacked cameras in our computers, cellphones and tablets, were near it.

Futuristic points: 2

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6 ways that 'Big Brother' technology in 'The Circle' is already happening - USA TODAY

By John O'Connor, The Associated Press

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner's technology czar has contracted to spend $208,000 in tax dollars for two professional memberships even though the state is without a budget and is billions of dollars in debt, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

Hardik Bhatt, the $145,000-a-year secretary of the Department of Innovation and Technology, has had a $50,000 annual membership in the Chief Information Officer Leadership Council of the Virginia-based executive-assistance organization CEB Inc. since 2015. He's also approved a $29,000 subscription and annual renewal for his agency, known as DoIT, with CEB's Risk Leadership Council.

DoIT, an agency created by executive order shortly after Republican Rauner took office in January 2015, is responsible for upgrading Illinois' digital technology infrastructure, providing statewide computer and telecommunications and oversight, improving cyber security, more precise management of the state's $1 billion investment portfolio, and making services for taxpayers easier to access.

DoIT spokeswoman Jennifer Schultz said the membership and subscription are "strategic investments" to help the state improve on an "outdated, inefficient" and unsafe system.

"These groups provide guidance and research to states and Fortune 500 companies," Schultz said in a prepared statement. "The benefit to Illinois is to learn and implement best practices in organization design, cyber-security, IT governance and other areas to help us avoid making the same mistakes the state has made previously in IT."

But the expenditures frustrated Rep. Fred Crespo, chairman of the House Appropriations-General Services Committee, which is scheduled to hear testimony about DoIT's budgetTuesday. The Hoffman Estates Democrat blamed it partly on the fact that DoIT was created by Rauner and is not subject to legislative oversight.

Crespo said he's troubled that money is spent on these services when the two-year budget stalemate between Rauner and Democrats controlling the General Assembly has meant millions of dollars in cuts to human-service providers and higher education.

"We're trying to connect the dots, figure out how much money is being spent" by DoIT, Crespo said. "These social service providers, universities that are dying, why are spending money on new computers at the expense of all these families, all these students, all people hurting. Tell me how that makes sense?"

A spokeswoman for CEB Inc. did not respond to a request for comment. The contract for the risk leadership council says membership provides "proven best practices, research and insight, peer benchmarks, decision and diagnostic tools, executive networking, advisory support and live and online learning events."

Although the state had chief information officers prior to DoIT's birth, there is no evidence of membership or subscription payments to CEB for several years prior to 2015.

Crespo noted that after GOP Comptroller Leslie Munger was defeated in a special election in November, she transferred $71 million from general revenue funds to specially earmarked accounts that in large part benefited DoIT. The membership money is out of one of them, a fund for "data processing and informational services."

Bhatt's $50,000 leadership council memberships were paid for 2016 and 2017, as was one year of the risk-group membership. But Munger's replacement, Democrat Susana Mendoza, who has sparred with Rauner over spending, particularly for DoIT, has not paid one year of each membership, totaling $79,000. Mendoza has held up payment while seeking answers general questions from DoIT on its initiatives. But the state is ultimately obligated to pay it because Bhatt signed contracts.

"This type of waste of tax dollars is why I will always demand accountability and transparency from every state agency," Mendoza said in a statement released to the APMonday. "Right now we could use an extra $200,000 for services for children, seniors and people who need help,"

Rep. David Harris of Arlington Heights, the Republican spokesman on the House general services appropriations panel, said the CEB benefits sound like they'd be helpful to technology chiefs for Fortune 500 companies or other large corporations but wondered whether there are many public-sector members.

"It's a significant amount of money and it begs the question, is there a significant amount of benefit?" Harris asked. "Are there benefits being provided that are available in more public forums that don't cost $50,000?"

-- Contact Political Writer John O'Connor at https://twitter.com/apoconnor. His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/john-oconnor.

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Illinois technology chief's memberships cost $208K - The State Journal-Register

Forbes

Three Key Investment Challenges At The Interface of Health and Technology Forbes Lisa Suennen, the co-author of this post, is Senior Managing Director at GE Ventures, author of the Venture Valkyrie blog, and co-host, with David, of the Tech Tonics podcast. Disclosure: GE Ventures portfolio companies mentioned in this post are ...

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Three Key Investment Challenges At The Interface of Health and Technology - Forbes

Big Island luxury Realtor uses 3D technology to sell $11 million property Pacific Business News (Honolulu) Eileen Lacerte, co-owner of Hawaii Beach and Golf Properties, uses 3D videos to help market and sell each of her Big Island listings as technology continues to change the way Realtors and photographers showcase luxury residential real estate properties.

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Big Island luxury Realtor uses 3D technology to sell $11 million property - Pacific Business News (Honolulu)

Blockchain technology is the coolest thing in Indian finance right now but nobody really gets it Quartz It's tough to keep up with technology. And India's finance sector knows it too well. Blockchain technology, based on concepts that underpin cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, is fast gaining pace in Asia's third-largest economy but business executives ... and more »

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Blockchain technology is the coolest thing in Indian finance right now but nobody really gets it - Quartz

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Kevin SeifertNFL Nation

Even at the dawn of the wearable technology era, NFL receiver Andrew Hawkins could see where it was all headed. There would come a day, Hawkins said, when player evaluation and even contract negotiations would hinge on the presumably objective data collected from chips inserted in shoulder pads for practices and games.

A player's average speed has decreased by 20 percent? He's a declining asset and merits a pay cut.

His exertion load in practice fell this season? He's not working as hard.

His average distance from defensive backs has decreased by half a yard? He can't get separation anymore.

"It's a matter of time before it gets here," Hawkins said in 2015, when he played for the Cleveland Browns. "You just have to hope there is a balance."

Indeed, the NFL Players Association appears to have produced an equalizer of sorts via a new agreement with the wearable tech company WHOOP, which was announced Monday morning.

This will provide players with their own data -- information they own and have the right to sell and distribute as they wish -- to push back against the NFL's accumulation of its own data.

The continuous biometric monitors (CBMs) will provide unique physiological information that can demonstrate strong work habits, personal discipline and high-end conditioning, among other data sets. A handful of players have already received the WHOOP Strap 2.0 device, and distribution will continue this week in Philadelphia, the site of the 2017 NFL draft.

"I can totally see it," said Ahmad Nassar, president of NFL Players Inc., the NFLPA's licensing and marketing subsidiary. "You could have a player who is super diligent in the offseason about working out and maximizing recovery scores, but also using the right amount of strain, being able to walk into a team facility and saying, 'I am someone who when I'm not here, I'm really busting my hump to be ready to go.' They can say, 'Don't just take my word for it. This data backs it up.'"

To be sure, many NFL lifers have pushed back against the influx of data into their traditionally subjective process. The league distributes location information from RFID chips after games, and most teams use some form of GPS chips in practice to measure exertion, but I struggled last month at the annual owners meetings to find a coach who found any of it vital to his daily work.

Even the Baltimore Ravens' John Harbaugh, one of the league's most open-minded coaches, called the game-day information "not particularly helpful."

"You can draw a few things from it, but it's new to our sport. Our sport is different from soccer, different from basketball. It's not as easily applied," Harbaugh added.

"All the coaches and all the organizations that are using it, and even the companies, are still trying to find out how to apply the information. What does it mean?"

In the big picture, however, industry advocates consider that viewpoint temporary and subject to evolution. Longer data histories will begin to provide more context, and more importantly, the next generation of coaches and executives will have been raised in a sports culture that includes both subjective and data-based evaluation. They'll be more comfortable with the idea and more likely to incorporate it organically.

That projection has prompted an industry scramble to align with the finite number of professional sports leagues and their athletes. The NFLPA's arrangement with WHOOP presages a number of big-picture issues that includes not only player evaluation but also the idea of personal data ownership and what that means.

The NFL uses what it collects during games and distributes some of it to its broadcast partners. Players now will have that option, as well, but Nassar acknowledged "we're in the early days" of figuring out how commercialization might work.

"It's kind of a like a gold rush at the moment," Nassar said, "where the only folks who make money are the ones who sell shovels and picks. You ask yourself, 'Is there gold in the mountains?' We think there is."

Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of WHOOP, conceives of elite athletes as trendsetters for the multibillion-dollar exercise industry. The general public, for example, took to weightlifting in the 1980s and 1990s as it grew in popularity among athletes.

"I think there is a story to be told there," Ahmed said. "How do the best athletes treat their bodies to recover optimally from a grueling sport?"

Ahmed cited WHOOP's work with Olympic swimmer Connor Jaeger, who used a CBM during time trials leading to the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016. Jaeger found that his body was still recovering from travel three days after arriving to the site of a trial, so he began arriving five days earlier to maximize his condition on the day of the swim.

"And he had an improvement in his times after that," Ahmed said. "One of the advantages here is understanding how travel affects recovery and realizing that recovery is a predictor of performance."

The wearable tech space remains a largely blank canvas in the NFL. But no one expects it to remain that way forever, and on Monday, the NFLPA took a seat at the table. We shall see where it goes from here.

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NFL players grab a data equalizer in era of wearable technology ... - ESPN (blog)

NEW YORK International Business Machines Corp. is piloting its Jeopardy-winning Watson technology as a tool for catching rogue traders at large financial institutions, executives said in an interview Monday.

The company's Watson Financial Services product looks for patterns in traders' chats and emails while also analyzing numerical trading data. The surveillance tool is being piloted with a handful, or fewer than 10, financial-industry clients, said Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president of IBM Industry Platforms.

The company is also developing other capabilities for the technology, Ms. van Kralingen said. One analyzes regulatory text to identify obligations that companies might face and to help assess whether the company's compliance programs are sufficient to comply with the rules. Another would assist banks in detecting suspicious customers or transactions.

The services are a new foray for IBM as it seeks to win a larger slice of the multibillion-dollar business of helping banks comply with regulations. The project is one of many efforts to make the Watson artificial intelligence computer program bear fruit six years after its debut besting human contestants on the Jeopardy game show.

In September, IBM agreed to buy financial consultancy Promontory Financial Group, a move executives said was designed to help train Watson in the Byzantine business of bank rules.

When it went on Jeopardy, Watson was a generalist, answering trivia questions about a range of topics. IBM has since been working to beef up its expertise in specific fields, such as treating cancer.

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The trader-surveillance capability is Watson's most advanced in the financial-services realm, said Ms. Van Kralingen and Eugene Ludwig, who founded Promontory and continues to run it as part of IBM, in a joint interview Monday.

They likened their effort to Watson's application for medical diagnoses. In that context, Watson will read medical literature and consider patient histories and symptoms before offering a potential diagnosis. At a financial firm, Watson might analyze trader chats, emails, trading data, market data and other inputs to flag cases where a bank employee might be engaging in insider trading or market manipulation.

The pitch is that banks need Watson because compliance officers alone can't analyze all that information, and because other technology relies on more rudimentary tools such as searching emails for words that might raise red flags. Watson, IBM says, analyzes more data and is more sophisticated in identifying patterns.

"I think about it like a detective that can do problem solving, rather than just a search. And that is the difference that many risk and compliance officers are desperate for," said Ms. Van Kralingen.

She said Watson is learning how to move beyond its ability to process language, which was the basis for its competition on Jeopardy, to work with numerical financial data.

The capability for Watson to analyze regulatory text and banks' own compliance systems is still under construction, she said. That project is relying both on Promontory's stable of expert former regulators and on data that Promontory has created identifying individual obligations for banks among thousands of pages of federal rules, the executives said.

In the anti-money-laundering arena, IBM is trying to create a tool that would be better than existing technology at identifying suspicious transactions, they said. The goal is for the technology to generate fewer "false positives" -- transaction alerts that banks spend time investigating, only to find out later that they are innocuous.

Mr. Ludwig said that "the enthusiasm is unbelievable" among potential clients for the anti-money-laundering tool.

To be sure, the learning process for Watson can be a long road. Previous projects have run into hurdles. One attempt to use it in cancer treatment at a Texas hospital stalled due in part to challenges of integrating the technology with the hospital's data systems, even though IBM said Watson itself was working effectively in that context.

Write to Ryan Tracy at ryan.tracy@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 24, 2017 13:54 ET (17:54 GMT)

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IBM Tests Watson Technology to Keep Eye on Traders - Fox Business

The thing that surprised me about the latest scandal brewing around Uber is that anybody is surprised. Accused of "fingerprinting" phonesassigning a persistent identity to the hardware and then associating this with a user of their serviceitsreal crime is the attempt to disguise the practice from Apple using geo-fencing. Because the only reason Apple has rules about fingerprinting phones is that, in the past, it was far more commonplace than you may have realized.

For the first few years of the iPhone's life Apple even provided a method call in their Software Development Kit (SDK)the software used to build apps for the phoneto help developers map unique hardware addresses to real names and phone numbers. Apple did this because uniquely mapping users to specific hardware simplifies a lot of backend management for app developers.

This method survived in the SDK for a number of years, and when it was finally deprecated back in 2011 there was a huge rush by developers to figure out how to generate a unique hardware fingerprint via other methods. Apple even created a drop-in replacement method to create a unique identifier when an app started for the first time, but this identity wasn't unique to the hardwareif a user deleted the app, and then reinstalled, a different unique identity was generatedso developers hated it.

So the fact Uber worked around Apple's rules doesn't surprise me in the slightest, considering the nature of its app doing so probably simplified the company's life enormously. Not least because it wasn't, at least on the face of things, using the hack to track its users but to combat driver fraud in markets like China. Its hubris, and the reason Travis Kalanick got a personal slap on the wrist from Tim Cook, was trying to disguise it from Apple. If Uber been more upfront about things it may well have gotten away with it. Anecdotally at least, it wouldn't have been the first time Apple had allowed "favored partners" to brake the App Store rules.

But as average people become more distant from the underlying mechanisms of how the technology they use every day actually works, it has become harder to explain how technology works.

Most people aren't particularly aware of the amount of data just leaks from their phones, to developers, and into the environment. I used to give a talk at big data conferences about what I call "migratory data,"the hidden data you carry with you all the time, the slowly growing data sets on your movements, contacts and social interactions, generated by your phone. But as average people become more distant from the underlying mechanisms of how the technology they use every day actually works, it has become harder to explain how technology works. I've stopped giving the talk, because even for the people working in technology, staying on top of how everything works has become a huge burden only alleviated by commoditization.

As an individual technology becomes a commodity the number of people who know how it works decreases. The obvious example technology to point to here, one we're all used to, is the car. Back in the 1950's pretty much every teenager worked on their own car, knew how it worked "under the hood." Today, most teenagers don't, and due to rising insurance ratesand perhaps an awareness that self-driving cars are on the horizona lot of teenagers aren't even learning to drive any more. Those of us approaching our middle years in Generation X are probably the last with that particular dying skill. Being able to drive will soon go the way of being able to ride a horse, something that you no longer need to know, because it's been hidden by technology.

You can see the same sort of commoditization in the cloud computing. The ability to run your own servers is a dying skill set amongst technologists, it has been hidden away. If you need a server, you just spin up an EC2 instance, and with "serverless" computing becoming more popular, even the knowledge of how to build and deploy an EC2 instance will become hidden by another layer of technology. The very name "serverless" shows how the underlying technology of servers has been encapsulation away from the end user. Of course there are servers, but most of us don't need to understand how they work any more.

This is how the modern world works: we build something, and then we commoditize it so that it can be used by non-experts. There really isn't any way to operate in today's society without this mechanism, but it makes systems fragile. Which is why projects like the Global Village Construction Seta set of open source designs to build all the manufacturing and agricultural tools you'd need to kickstart an industrial civilizationexist. Because if you dig deep enough eventually we all run out of knowledge. Cars, servers, microchips, it just depends when your personal technology stack runs out.

Cloud computing has spawned a whole clutch of interesting startups and tools that couldn't be built without it, however evidently they're all things that could be implemented on top of the cloud. It's therefore sort of interesting to speculate what technologies haven't arrived because it's hard, or even impossible, to implement them inside the framework of the higher level concepts that form the basis of understanding for most developers now using cloud infrastructure.

If we lose sight of the underlying workings of technology we limit our vision to the use cases that were originally envisioned when the wrappers around it were created.

If a developer doesn't understand how things work underneath they'll use them as a black box, and using tools in that fashion makes doing things that the original expert that built the high level toodoing things out of the ordinaryalmost impossible. If we lose sight of the underlying workings of technology we limit our vision to the use cases that were originally envisioned when the wrappers around it were created.

You can do a lot of interesting things by shrugging off the underlying complexity and using the black boxes other people have built. But you can do entirely different interesting things when you fundamentally understand what's inside the boxes. The next level down. Because you can make the technology do things that people working at the black box level can't.

Of course these days, in this century, the level below the black box is usually another level of black boxes. It's pretty much black boxes all the way down. For instance, it has now actually become impossible to design a modern microprocessor by hand; to do that, you need a computer. Think about that for a bit in the dead of night, and about how fragile that makes us as a society.

The modern world just wouldn't be possible without commoditization of knowledge. But you should at least try and be aware of what you don't know, and a lot of people aren't. Which to me, is the only thing the Uber story goes to prove.

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Uber Fingerprinting Users Shows the Danger of Thinking All Technology Is Magic - Motherboard

Our inner filter is made from a 100% pure activated carbon cloth, which was originally invented by the UK Ministry of Defence. It was then extensively developed and made into a product for use in chemical, biological and nuclear warfare protection, used by armed forces around the world.

All activated carbons traditionally powders and granules generate Van der Waal forces due to their porous structure. These forces give activated carbons their unique potential to absorb molecules, including anions and cations into their internal pores.

Our filter material is comprised of a series of activated carbon filaments, each about 2,000 nanometres in diameter. The pores in each filament are 25 times smaller than those in standard carbon materials, and therefore more powerful. This means that bacteria and viruses are drawn to the surface from further away.

The high number of filaments spun into a yarn and then woven into cloth concentrate and intensify the Van der Waal forces, including powerful electrostatic charges. This way, not only are molecules such as endotoxins quickly absorbed into the pores from a much wider area, but these forces also attract and immobilise much larger particles including bacteria, which often have a negatively charged membrane. The material traps the bacteria and draws out the gel-like cytoplasm inside killing it and preventing infection.

Cambridge Masks are therefore powerful respirators that not only clear the air of pollution via the particulate filter, but also remove potentially harmful pathogens with the additional carbon filter.

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Technology | Cambridge Mask

A new court filing from Alphabet claims that Uber hid a key piece of self-driving technology that it allegedly copied from Waymo, the Google parent companys autonomous vehicle subsidiary.

They were hiding a device, Alphabet said in a filing today, supporting its motion for a preliminary injunction that would prevent Uber from working on self-driving technology.

Uber says it isnt hiding anything and did not infringe on Alphabets patents.

Alphabet has sued Uber over claims it stole its proprietary self-driving technology. At the center of the suit is a former Alphabet executive, Anthony Levandowski, who led its early efforts in developing self-driving technology.

Alphabet claims Levandowski stole 14,000 files from Alphabet before leaving to launch his own autonomous truck startup, Otto. Uber acquired Otto last August. The files include designs for Alphabets lidar (light detection and ranging) technology, a key component to most self-driving systems.

In the latest filing, Alphabet says Uber hid a lidar device Levandowski designed based on these files. The company says Uber obfuscated the existence of a piece of lidar technology at an April 12 hearing.

Uber denies this and says it eventually produced the device in question. A representative for Uber told Recode the company did not initially produce the device because they did not think they were required to do so as its designs had been abandoned.

Alphabet has declined to say whether it has inspected the device in question.

Uber said in a previous filing opposing the preliminary injunction Alphabets allegations are demonstrably false.

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Alphabet claims Uber was hiding the self-driving technology that it allegedly ripped off - Recode