Amazon said Wednesday that it plans to use self-driving drones to deliver packages to shoppers’ home in the coming months 

The online shopping giant did not give exact timing or say where the drones will be making deliveries.

Amazon said its new drones use computer vision and machine learning to detect and avoid people or laundry clotheslines in backyards when landing.  

“From paragliders to power lines to a corgi in the backyard, the brain of the drone has safety covered,” said Jeff Wilke, who oversees Amazon’s retail business. 

Wilke said the drones are fully electric, can fly up to 15 miles and carry packages that weigh up to five pounds. 

Amazon has been working on drone delivery for years. Back in December 2013, Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos told the “60 Minutes” news show that drones would be flying to customer’s homes within five years. But that deadline passed due to regulatory hurdles.  

The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates commercial use of drones in the U.S., did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. 

In April, a subsidiary of search giant Google won approval from the FAA to make drone deliveries in parts of Virginia. 
…

YouTube said on Wednesday it would remove videos that deny the Holocaust, school shootings and other “well-documented violent events,” a major reversal in policy as it fights criticism that it provides a platform for hate speech and harassment.

The streaming service, owned by Alphabet Inc’s Google, also said it would remove videos that glorify Nazi ideology or promote groups that claim superiority to others to justify several forms of discrimination.

In addition, video creators that repeatedly brush up against YouTube’s hate speech policies, even without violating them, will be removed from its advertising revenue-sharing program, YouTube spokesman Farshad Shadloo said.

YouTube for years has stood by allowing diverse commentary on history, race and other fraught issues, even if some of it was objectionable to many users.

But regulators, advertisers and users have complained that free speech should have its limits online, where conspiracies and hate travel fast and can radicalize viewers. The threat of widespread regulation, and a few advertiser boycotts, appear to have spurred more focus on the issue from YouTube and researchers.

In a blog post, the company did not explain why it changed its stance but said “we’ve been taking a close look at our approach towards hateful content in consultation with dozens of experts in subjects like violent extremism, supremacism, civil rights and free speech.”

YouTube acknowledged the new policies could hurt researchers who seek out objectionable videos “to understand hate in order to combat it.” The policies could also frustrate free speech advocates who say hate speech should not be censored.

Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, which researches anti-Semitism, said it had provided input to YouTube on the policy change.

“While this is an important step forward, this move alone is insufficient and must be followed by many more changes from YouTube and other tech companies to adequately counter the scourge of online hate and extremism,” Greenblatt said in a statement.

Other types of videos to be removed under YouTube’s new rules include conspiracy theories about Jews running the world, calls for denying women civil rights because of claims they are less intelligent than men, and some white nationalist content, Shadloo said.

YouTube said creators in the revenue-sharing program who are repeatedly found posting borderline hate content would be notified when they do it one too many times and could appeal their termination. The company did not immediately respond to questions about what the limit on such postings would be.

 
…

China on Wednesday launched a rocket from a mobile platform at sea for the first time, sending a five commercial satellites and two others containing experimental technology into space.

The Long March 11 rocket blasted off from a launch pad aboard a commercial ship in the Yellow Sea off the coast of Shandong province, marking the 306th launch of a rocket in the Long March series, but the first one at sea.

China is the third country after the U.S. and Russia to master sea launch technology.

Sea launches offer advantages such as the ability to position closer to the equator, requiring less fuel to reach orbit and thereby lowering overall launch costs. It also reduces the possibility of damage on the ground from falling rocket debris.

The official Xinhua News Agency cited experts as saying seaborne launch technology will meet the growing demand for launches of low inclination satellites.

China’s space program has developed rapidly, especially since it conducted its first crewed mission in 2003, becoming just the third country following Russia and the U.S. to put humans into space using its own technology.

It has put two space stations into orbit and plans to launch a Mars rover in the mid-2020s. Its space program suffered a rare setback last year with the failed launch of a Long March 5 rocket.

 
…

Lawmakers in Washington DC met Tuesday to discuss facial recognition software. Law enforcement says the technology helps to identify and track suspected criminals. But privacy advocates say the technology intrudes on the privacy of average citizens who aren’t lawbreakers. Arash Arabasadi reports from Washington.
…

At the Tribeca Film Fest in New York, filmmakers are mining current and historical events for inspiration. For tech-savvy youth, it’s one way to ensure the lessons of history won’t be forgotten. Tina Trinh reports.
…

Apple will preview upcoming changes to its phone and computer software Monday as it undergoes a major transition intended to offset eroding sales of its bedrock iPhone.

The company’s software showcase is an annual rite. But Apple is currently grappling with its biggest challenge since its visionary co-founder, Steve Jobs, died nearly eight years ago.

Many of the software updates are expected to be tailored for the digital services that Apple is rolling out to lessen its iPhone dependence.

Although still popular, the iPhone is no longer reliably driving Apple’s profits higher.  sales have fallen sharply for the past two quarters and there’s little reason to expect a quick turnaround.
…

Congested Google servers in the eastern United States caused problems for users of Snapchat and YouTube on Sunday, with complaints on social media that the popular apps weren’t accessible.

Google acknowledged the issue, writing in a statement on its Cloud Platform status page that it was dealing with “high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA, affecting multiple services in Google Cloud, G Suite and YouTube.”

“Users may see slow performance or intermittent errors,” it said, adding that engineers had completed the first of two steps to restore normal operations.

Earlier in the day, social media users complained of trouble loading a slew of popular websites and apps.

“Google, YouTube, Snapchat, Shopify, all currently down. Is the internet melting?” asked one Twitter post.

Snapchat and Google-owned YouTube both acknowledged the server issue on their Twitter accounts.

Cloud computing is one of Google’s most lucrative services, but faces stiff competition from other technology companies like Amazon and Microsoft.

In March, the world’s largest social network, Facebook, blamed a “server configuration change” for a massive outage affecting its applications around the world.

The outage affected users for at least 12 hours in most areas of the world, with the biggest impact in North America and Europe, a tracking website said at the time.

 
…

U.S. antitrust regulators have divided oversight of Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, putting Amazon under the watch of the Federal Trade Commission and Google under the Justice Department, the Washington Post said Saturday.

Amazon could face heightened antitrust scrutiny under a new agreement between U.S. regulators that puts the e-commerce giant under the watch of the trade commission, the newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The development is the result of the FTC and Justice Department quietly dividing up competition oversight on both of the American tech giants, Amazon and Google, the newspaper said, adding that the FTC’s plans for Amazon and the Justice Department’s interest in Google were not immediately clear.

The news comes after Reuters and other media reported Friday that the Justice Department is preparing an investigation into Google in order to ascertain whether the company broke antitrust law in operating its online businesses.

Google said it had no comment on the report, while Amazon, the FTC and Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the report.
…

Powerful magnets at a laboratory in Florida are allowing researchers to see the unseeable, understand the nature of things, and break the boundaries of scientific knowledge. Faith Lapidus has more on the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.
…

Children who either played or watched a video game that included gun violence were more likely afterward to handle a gun and pull the trigger, a new study finds.

More than 200 children were randomly assigned to play either a non-violent video game or a game with firearm violence. Soon after, more than 60% of kids who played the violent game touched a gun, compared to about 44% of those who played a non-violent game, researchers report in JAMA Network Open.

The lessons from the new findings are that: “gun owners should secure their guns,” and “parents should protect their children from violent media, including video games,” said study coauthor Brad Bushman, a professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

“Each day in the United States, nearly 50 children and teenagers are shot with a firearm, often as a result of a child finding one loaded and unsecured,” Bushman and his coauthor Justin Chang, a former graduate student at Ohio State, wrote.

“Among firearm-owning households with children, approximately 20% keep at least one firearm loaded and unsecured.”

Bushman and Chang recruited 242 kids, ages 8 to 12, to look at the impact of violent video games. The children were partnered up and then randomly assigned to one of three groups: a version of Minecraft that included violence with guns, a version that included violence with swords and a non-violent version. No matter which game a pair of children was assigned to, one would play the game and the other would watch.

After playing the games for 20 minutes, the children were moved to another room that contained toys for them to play with as well as two disabled guns with trigger counters that had been tucked away in a cabinet.

Out of the 242 children recruited, 220 eventually found the guns and those kids were included in the study.

Among the 76 children who played video games that included guns, 61.8% handled the weapon, as compared 56.8% of the 74 who played a game including sword violence and 44.3% of the 70 who played a non-violent game.

Children who played violent video games were also more likely to pull the trigger, researchers found.

How many times children pulled the trigger depended on the video game they watched.

It was a median of “10.1 times if they played the version of Minecraft where the monsters could be killed with guns, 3.6 times if they played the version of Minecraft where the monsters could be killed with swords and 3.0 times if they played the version of Minecraft without weapons and monsters,” Bushman said in an email.

“The more important outcome, though, is pulling the trigger of a gun while pointing that gun at oneself or one’s partner [children were tested in pairs],” Bushman said. There, the median was 3.4 times for the game with gun violence, 1.5 times for the game with swords and 0.2 times for non-violent games.

The new study “is the most rigorous design that can be conducted,” said Cassandra Crifasi, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

While “it’s important to recognize certain types of entertainment can be violent, when it comes to firearms, the solution is to store guns safely so that children can’t gain access,” Crifasi said. “That doesn’t mean children won’t engage in other violent play. But we can cut off guns as a source of potential harm.”

Dr. Shari Platt agreed that the best way to protect kids is proper gun storage.

“The study is interesting and I think they are touching on some very real fears parents have around graphically violent video games,” said Platt, chief of pediatric medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and an associate professor of clinical emergency medicine. But in the end, “education and prevention are always the answers.”

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2EHXw4w and http://bit.ly/2EJslpC JAMA Network Open, online May 31, 2019.
…

British mobile phone operator EE on Thursday became the first in the country to launch a high-speed 5G service, but without smartphones from controversial Chinese technology giant Huawei.

EE, which is a division of British telecoms giant BT, has launched 5G in six major cities comprising Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, London and Manchester — and more hubs will follow.

“From today, the U.K. will be able to discover 5G for the first time thanks to EE,” it announced in a statement, after an official launch featuring a performance from chart-topping grime act Stormzy on a boat on London’s River Thames.

Next-generation 5G mobile networks offer almost instantaneous data transfer that will become the nervous system of Europe’s economy in strategic sectors like energy, transport, banking and health care.

EE had announced last week that it would make its 5G network available to the public — but would not sell Huawei’s first 5G phone, the Mate 20 X 5G.

However, the Chinese company still provides 5G network infrastructure equipment to EE.

“We are very pleased to be one of the partners supporting EE with a new era of faster and more reliable mobile connectivity over 5G in the U.K.,” a Huawei spokesperson told AFP on Thursday.

Rival British mobile phone giant Vodafone will launch its own 5G services on July 3 in seven UK cities — but it has also paused the sale of the Huawei Mate 20 X 5G smartphone.

Vodafone does not use Huawei in its core UK network but uses a mixture of Ericsson and Huawei technology in its radio access network or masts, according to a company spokesman. He added that there are “multiple” layers of security between the masts and the core network.

Huawei faces pushback in some Western markets over fears that Beijing could spy on communications and gain access to critical infrastructure if allowed to develop foreign 5G networks.

The Chinese company flatly denies what it describes as “unsubstantiated claims” about being a security threat.

US internet titan Google has meanwhile started to cut ties between its Android operating system and Huawei, a move that affects hundreds of millions of smartphone users, after the U.S. government announced what amounts to a ban on selling or transferring technology to the company.

Earlier this week, Huawei asked a U.S. court to throw out US legislation that bars federal agencies from buying its products.

The U.S. moves against Huawei come as the Washington and Beijing are embroiled in a wider trade war.

 
…

Electric vehicles have struggled to gain mass appeal in much of the world despite the fanfare surrounding Tesla Motors, the world’s best-selling brand of plug-in cars last year. Drivers worry about prices, comfort and what happens when a battery expires in the middle of a trip.

But in Taiwan, scooter vendor Gogoro doubles its sales every year largely because of a widespread battery exchange network supported by a central government that’s keen to control emissions. Gogoro designs what it describes as ride-able scooters as well as engines for other brands, filling what the chief executive officer calls earlier market voids.

“People say we’re the two wheels of Tesla, and in some ways, we are,” CEO and co-founder Horace Luke said. “We do a little bit of everything.”

The company, which launched in 2011, first had to prove that it could all be done.

“Nobody could believe that an electric vehicle could be cool and fun to ride, so we built that,” said Horace Luke, founder of Gogoro. “Nobody believed that you could swap batteries, so we enabled that.”

Battery swaps

Gogoro stands out among other electric scooter developers by working with Taiwan’s central government plus the city of Taipei to locate and pay for 1,300 battery swap stations. Those alleviate rider fears of running out of juice in mid-trip, a barrier to development of the world’s $17.43 billion electric vehicle industry.

Battery swap sites are placed every 500 meters in urban Taiwan, usually in obvious roadside locations. They turn up every two to five kilometers in other parts of the island. The central government pays half the cost of building the swap stations and offers publicly accessible land, Luke said. The government’s National Development Fund invested venture capital in Gogoro in 2014.

“You should have seen how hard it was for first 50 stations; it was almost impossible,” recalled Luke, 49, a Seattle native and former software designer who moved to Taiwan for the engineering talent and supply chain. He co-founded Gogoro in 2011. 

“And our consumers are the ones voicing out. They go to the government and say ‘I want this here’,” he said. 

Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Administration has set a goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions 10 percent from 2005 levels by 2025 and hacking them by 20 by 2030. 

For the government now, Luke added, “it’s a win-win situation for them to adopt electric.” 

Gogoro’s stations do 90,000 swaps per day. Those transactions give Gogoro the data it needs to know where it should resupply batteries.

Worldwide, just “a handful” of countries have “significant market share” of electric cars, the independent, intergovernmental International Energy Agency says. Norway led in 2017 with 39 percent of new sales in 2017, followed by Iceland at 11.7 percent and Sweden at 6.3 percent.

Taiwanese still want to know more about their next battery, said Paul Hsu, co-founder of Okgo.life, a fellow Taiwanese electric scooter brand with an app that lists types and prices of batteries at the swap sites on its roster.

“Every rider has a plan for every trip. The riders know where they’re going but not how much money it will take to get there,” Hsu said. For example, he said, “a short trip should have a short-distance vehicle and a short-distance price.”

‘Fun to ride’

Gogoro has raised its sales as well by designing scooter models attractive to men who like bigger motorcycles along as well as vehicles aimed at female riders. Sales doubled last year and they’re on track to double again this year, Luke said. 

Total sales are about 160,000, or 16 percent of the total Taiwan scooter fleet. Tesla, by comparison, sold about 532,000 cars worldwide from 2012 to 2018.

Taiwanese adapted especially fast because of the earlier prevalence of gas-powered scooters. Riders were comfortable with the idea of scooters in general – just not the noise and pollution they kick up.

Tsai Cheng-yang, 36, an urban designer of the southern Taiwan city Tainan, has five electric scooters in his household. Compared to gas-powered scooters, he said, electric ones a quieter, give off less heat and lack the stench of fuel, he said. Operation costs are about the same, he said.

“If all vehicles were an electric powered, you’d feel it was quite peaceful, with no odors either, quite happy and a different experience,” Tsai said.

Gogoro plans to overcome competitors such as Yamaha and Aeon by selling motors to them, giving it a cross-brand presence, Luke said. “The idea is to create a platform allowing others to create their own vehicles,” he said.
…