Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

"Get The Facts": How Twitter Is Making The Case Against Itself And Free Speech by Tyler Durden Sun, 05/31/2020 - 13:10 Authored by Jonathan Turley, President Donald Trump has continued to tweet on cracking down on the riots as well as controversy over his tweets on Twitter. Like former Vice President Joe Biden, he is now calling for the outright elimination of Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act . While supported by many liberal members and commentators, Twitter continues to build a case against itself - and ultimately free speech on the Internet. Free speech, our defining right in the United States, seems to be dangling on social media. Twitter added warnings on tweets from President Trump , marking a major escalation of speech controls on the internet, something that has been demanded by Democrats. While the company clarified that Trump did not violate the rules, it still intervened between him and all his followers to add its own view of the truth on a p...

World's Largest All-Electric Passenger Aircraft Makes Maiden Flight by Tyler Durden Fri, 05/29/2020 - 23:30 The world's largest all-electric-powered utility aircraft conducted its maiden flight on Thursday, reported Flight Global . The electric-powered Cessna 208B Caravan is a utility aircraft produced by Cessna Aircraft Company, has been traditionally used for flight training to recreation, commuter airlines to VIP transport, cargo carriers, humanitarian missions, and Special Forces operations.  Flight Global said propulsion company Magnix and AeroTEC, an engineering and flight test specialist, swapped out the plane's Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6 turboprop engine with an all-electric propulsion system, that can produce 750hp. After the successful test flight, the plane is now considered the largest all-electric passenger aircraft ever to fly. Magnix and AeroTEC believe economically-feasible all-electric commercial f...

Biotech Startup Aims to Make Use of Humanity’s Genetic Outliers Ashlee Vance May 28, 2020 (Bloomberg Businessweek) -- The Sherpa people living at high altitudes in Nepal and the Himalayas have a genetic trait that puzzles and fascinates scientists. They’re able to lead healthy, active lives with blood oxygen levels far below what most humans need to function properly. Where other people in high altitudes have adapted to boost their oxygen to typical levels over time, the Sherpa have gene variants that let them live in what should be a hypoxic, or oxygen-starved, state. “They don’t suffer any ill health effects,” says geneticist Stephane Castel. “It’s incredible.” Castel is the co-founder of Variant Bio, a startup that’s spent the past couple years scouring the planet for genetic outliers. His team is betting that by sequencing such people’s DNA, Variant will be able to untangle the root causes of desirable traits—superior metabolism, eyesight, immune response—and synthesiz...

Spain to offer families minimum monthly income Associated Press May 29, 2020 MADRID - The Spanish government will provide more money for the country’s most impoverished 850,000 families so they can reach a minimum monthly income in the nation’s first attempt to guarantee a basic salary. The plan was approved by the ruling left-wing coalition led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. The leader of the Spanish Socialist Party is under pressure to spur economic recovery and reduce the fallout from a two-month lockdown to contain the spread of the coronavirus that’s killed at least 27,000. Citizens over 21 will be eligible for benefits if they don’t meet a minimum monthly income ranging from 461 euros ($513) to 1,015 euros ($1,130), depending on the number of family members. Migrants who have been in Spain for more than one year can apply. Social Security Minister José Luis Escrivá says the measure intends to reduce poverty and inequality. He says 100,000 households will i...

Microsoft News just cut dozens of editorial workers as it shifts to an AI-driven system of picking stories Lucia Moses  May 29, 2020 Microsoft News has just shed dozens of contractors as it moves to an AI-driven system of picking news and away from human editors for MSN.com, one of the world's biggest news destinations. Earlier this year, a reorganization put Microsoft News under Microsoft's Bing search engine, which is algorithm-driven, insiders said. Insiders said the most recent move is the latest attempt by Microsoft News to move away from relying on human editors. Several insiders expressed skepticism about the ability of an algorithm to do all the subtle things that human editors do well, though. Microsoft News has shed dozens of editorial workers this week as it moves to an AI-driven system of picking news and away from human editors for MSN.com, one of the world's biggest news destinations. People close to t...

Google Just Gave Millions Of Users A Reason To Quit Chrome Gordon Kelly Senior Contributor May 28, 2020, 06:20am EDT Google has been  reinventing Chrome recently , but the company has also just revealed a powerful reason you should quit and move to a rival browser.  Google has confirmed ageing code within its Chrome browser leaves it vulnerable to attack In a bold new report (via  ZDNet ), Google engineers  have revealed  that “unsafe” code within Chrome is responsible for 70% of its security vulnerabilities and 125 of the 130 “critical” bugs found in the browser over the last year.  05/28 Update: expanding upon this story, it is important to note that Microsoft is already working on replacing the C and C++ code code in its Chromium-based Edge browser with Project Veronica, code inspired by Rust (detailed below). Discussing this decision with  ZDNet  earlier this month, Microsoft states C and C++ have "reached a wall [and] We can't real...

Scientists create virus that has potential to fight cancer By  Jackie Salo May 28, 2020  |  2:47pm Not all viruses set out to cause widespread death and sickness — some have the potential to fight cancer, according to new research. Researchers from Hokkaido University in Japan have genetically engineered adenoviruses, which is a family of viruses that cause mild symptoms, to replicate inside cancer cells and kill them, according to a  new paper in the journal Cancers . To do this, Fumihiro Higashino, a molecular oncologist, and his team inserted adenylate-uridylate-rich elements (AREs) from two human genes — a stabilizing element found in a type of macromolecule present in all biological cells — into two strains of the virus to help specifically attack cancer cells. “The idea behind the insertion is that the AREs will stabilize the killer adenoviruses, allowing them to replicate only inside cancer cells but not in normal healthy ones,”  Higashino sa...

NSA's Social Network Mapping is More Vast, Omnipresent, & Horrifying Than Snowden Revealed by Tyler Durden Wed, 05/27/2020 - 20:05 Authored by Jake Anderson via TheMindUnleashed.com, Most people know by now about the surveillance abuses perpetrated by the NSA earlier this century, but a new book about Edward Snowden suggests that the metadata collection programs introduced to us through previous whistleblowers and disclosures are part of a “live, ever-updating social graph of the US” that is ongoing and far vaster than we previously imagined. The revelations come from journalist Barton Gellman, who described the content of his new book Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State for Wired . The article, entitled “Inside the NSA’s Secret Tool for Mapping Your Social Network,” catalogs Gellman’s attempts to reveal more details about the programs Snowden first disclosed to the world. What he found shocked him and, he says, represents an ongoing existential th...

France's Determination To End Free Speech Knows No Limits by Tyler Durden Wed, 05/27/2020 - 03:30 Authored by Judith Bergman via The Gatestone Institute, On May 13, the French parliament adopted a law that requires online platforms such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat to remove reported "hateful content" within 24 hours and "terrorist content" within one hour. Failure to do so could result in exorbitant fines of up to €1.25 million or 4% of the platform's global revenue in cases of repeated failure to remove the content. The scope of online content deemed "hateful" under what is known as the "Avia law" (after the lawmaker who proposed it) is, as is common in European hate speech laws, very broadly demarcated and includes "incitement to hatred, or discriminatory insult, on the grounds of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or disability". The French law was directly inspired b...

Mapped: The State Of Facial Recognition Around The World by Tyler Durden Mon, 05/25/2020 - 21:00 From public CCTV cameras to biometric identification systems in airports, facial recognition technology is now common in a growing number of places around the world. In its most benign form, facial recognition technology is a convenient way to unlock your smartphone. However, as Visual Capitalist's Iman Ghosh notes , at the state level, facial recognition is a key component of mass surveillance, and it already touches half the global population on a regular basis. Today’s visualizations from SurfShark classify 194 countries and regions based on the extent of surveillance. Click here to explore the full research methodology . Let’s dive into the ways facial recognition technology is used across every region.  North America, Central America, and Caribbean In the U.S., a 2016 study showed that already half of American adults were captured in some kind of facial recognition network. Mor...

Wayback Machine Latest Victim Of Big Tech Consolidation And Censorship by Tyler Durden Mon, 05/25/2020 - 11:20 Authored by Raul Diego via MintPressNews.com, In what is turning out to be something of a latter-day dot com bust, many small to medium-sized tech startups are teetering on the edge of oblivion as the deliberate economic shutdown eats away at their capitalization and opens the door for the biggest fish in the tech space and others to pick the ripest fruit from the tech start up tree. As opposed to the original, this start up bust is accompanied by a very precise view of market opportunities for interested buyers and investors, brought on by an equally deliberate reshaping of workplace conditions and societal interactions which are driving companies like Microsoft to “ aggregate capabilities ” in “cloud computing, collaboration, access management, and other business continuity tools that saw a surge in demand during regional lockdowns.” The ride-share behemoth, Uber, for ex...

Silicon Valley Tech Giants Caught Providing Services To Blacklisted Chinese Security Firms by Tyler Durden Sat, 05/23/2020 - 17:30 Remember when ex-Google Chairman Eric Schmidt appeared on CNBC earlier this month for an interview with Andrew Ross "the Sork" Sorkin - an interview that swiftly devolved into Schmidt chiding the Trump Administration for its impudence while defending the longstanding ties between the Chinese Communist Party leadership and Silicon Valley's elite and warning about the purportedly extraordinarily high costs of 'economic decoupling'. Because the downside about decoupling, Schmidt said, is that if China turns elsewhere for ag products and other products, "they're not coming back" (this as China continues the charade of upholding the trade deal because President Xi needs an excuse to buy US agricultural products without looking weak) The former Google chairman's comments on China begin around the 13-minute mark. In a rep...

What History Tells Us About the Accelerating AI Revolution 3d rendering robot learning or machine learning with education hud interface   PHOTO:  GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO By   Irving Wladawsky-Berger May 22, 2020 1:40 pm ET A few weeks before our lives were turned upside down by Covid-19, I read  Technology at Work v4.0 , the fourth report in the  Technology at Work Series  developed by  Citigroup  in collaboration with  Oxford University .  The report includes an excellent chapter on What History Tells Us About the Coming AI Revolution by Oxford professor  Carl Benedikt Frey  based on his 2019 book  The Technology Trap . Recent AI advances have “sparked much excitement…  yet despite this, most ordinary people don’t feel particularly optimistic about the future,” wrote Mr. Frey.  For example, a  2017 Pew Research survey   found  that three quarters of Americans expressed serious concerns...