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

Top Apple, Tesla Suppliers Suspend Production Amid China Power Crunch   BY TYLER DURDEN MONDAY, SEP 27, 2021 - 11:00 AM   Update (0948ET):  Several suppliers for Apple and Tesla announced the suspension of manufacturing operations in China on Sunday and Monday due to local electricity constraints.  The latest is Pegatron, which assembles iPhones at manufacturing plants in Kunshan and Suzhou, announced Monday that it's "taking energy-saving measures to comply with local government policies," according to  Bloomberg .  Pegatron said Sunday that all operations were running normally, and it prepared alternative power generator sources should the government reduce or shut power to their plants.  Sources told Bloomberg that Pegatron's iPhone facility in Kunshan will be affected the most.  "Pegatron has been adopting energy- and water-saving measures over the past few years and there is a comprehensive response program for the current situa...

Facebook Scraps "Instagram Kids" As Backlash Intensifies   BY TYLER DURDEN MONDAY, SEP 27, 2021 - 08:23 AM   After being asked by a cadre of 40 state attorneys general to abandon the project (on the grounds it would be bad for psychological development and also create a 'predator's paradise'), Facebook's Instagram announced Monday in  a blog post  that it has finally abandoned its ill-fated "Instagram Kids" service which was supposed to create a parallel version of the service for children under the age of 13. As it stands now, many (poorly supervised) youngsters are already using the adult versions of these services, being exposed to all the age-inappropriate content that comes with it (twitter still has straight-up porn). But somewhere along the line, as the backlash to the harms social media allegedly causes to teenage mental health and self esteem intensified, Facebook scrambled to find a solution that would, first and foremost, protect...

Apple Begins To Research Whether iPhones Can Detect Mental Health Issues BY TYLER DURDEN TUESDAY, SEP 21, 2021 - 10:25 PM Despite its marketing promise of privacy, Apple has become more creepy over the decade in the amount of data it collects from users. Some of that data includes location information, usage time, health data, and transaction data, among others. The company uses the data for targeted advertising. According to a  WSJ , it wants to  repurpose the data and determine if users are depressed, anxious, or experiencing a cognitive decline. Citing internal Apple documents and people familiar with the matter, WSJ said Apple is working with scientists to collect users' health data that can easily be extracted from iPhone and other Apple devices that could one day  warn if users are at risk of mental health problems .  The research is part of a new study with Apple and Biogen and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), announced earlie...

TikTok Restricts Screen Time To Just 40 Minutes Per Day For Chinese Youths   BY TYLER DURDEN SUNDAY, SEP 19, 2021 - 08:30 PM Another day, another Chinese crackdown targeting permissible online screen time for young Chinese users. This time, ByteDance, the maker of short-video mobile juggernaut TikTok, said that it would restrict access to Douyin, the Chinese version of the app, to 40 minutes a day for users under 14 years old. According to the  WSJ , Douyin’s “youth mode,” which follows the imposition of new limits on younger Chinese users’ access to online videogames, will restrict under-14s to using the app between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. The app will be inaccessible to all users in that age group outside of those hours. While Douyin had introduced some of the features beginning in 2018 on an optional basis, the latest rollout will apply to all users registered with their real names and as being under 14 years old, Douyin said Saturday.  It said that  the mand...

In-Car Cameras Are Now Watching Every Little Thing You Do   BY TYLER DURDEN SUNDAY, SEP 19, 2021 - 11:30 PM   Gone are the days where you could hop in your car and escape to somewhere for a little privacy. That's because cameras that were put in cars to catch drivers falling asleep are now catching... well, everything. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute have now developed a smart-car camera system that can "figure out exactly what a driver is doing,"  according to a new Gizmodo report . And already the camera is being positioned as "potentially improving the safety of semi-autonomous driving features" and a feature that could help drivers in semi-autonomous vehicles pay attention to the road. The "appeal" of these points is what prompted the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation to come up with a camera that uses AI powered image recognition to construct a digital sketch of the driver - which t...

Forget 5G, China Leads The 6G Charge   BY TYLER DURDEN SATURDAY, SEP 18, 2021 - 11:00 PM   While the world is still very much in the transition phase with  5G ,  research is already well underway for the next iteration of the technology standard for mobile broadband networks -  6G . Statista's Martin Armstrong notes that , according to a whitepaper by Samsung it takes an average of ten years for a new standard to become ready for commercialization, with 5G taking eight years. The tech giant suggested a potential rollout date of 2028-2030 for 6G, highlighting the urgent need for progress to be made. As this infographic shows,  the country at the front of this new charge is China. You will find more infographics at  Statista Data from the Cyber Creative Institute as covered by Nikkei Asia shows that of around 20,000 6G-related patent applications as of August 2021, 40.3 percent originated from the Asian superpower.  The United States i...

Facebook Deletes German Anti-Lockdown Groups As New Censorship Rules Go Into Effect   BY TYLER DURDEN SATURDAY, SEP 18, 2021 - 11:00 AM   This week, Facebook announced a new enforcement policy that seeks to deplatform groups who coordinate online and spread misinformation, hate speech, and incite violence.   The new "coordinated social harm" policy was immediately used against 150 pages and groups connected to Germany's Querdenken (Lateral Thinking) movement, which has routinely fueled resistance to government health restrictions and vaccines through anti-lockdown protests. Facebook's head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher wrote in a  blog  update Thursday that his team has been "expanding our network disruption efforts so we can address threats that come from groups of authentic accounts coordinating on our platform to cause social harm."  Gleicher said: "Today, we're sharing our enforcement against a network of accounts, Pages and ...

Facebook Aided In Recruitment Of Modern Day Slaves, Cartel Hitmen Internal Documents Show   BY TYLER DURDEN THURSDAY, SEP 16, 2021 - 08:50 PM    It seems like the  WSJ's  entire San Francisco bureau has been preoccupied lately with churning out a series of stories sourced from "leaked" internal Facebook documents exposing embarrassing internal reports on everything from Instagram's  deleterious impact on the mental health of its twentysomething and teenage users  to political divisiveness to - today's entry - how Facebook's products are abused to facilitated human trafficking and terror recruitment in parts of the emerging world. The gist of the piece is this: Facebook has a small staff dedicated to combating human trafficking around the world, particularly in countries where the rule of law isn't as robust as it is in the US and Europe. In the Middle East, Facebook is used to lure women into sex slavery (or some other form of exploitative labo...

Japan's First Fully Autonomous Container Ship Is About To Tackle A 236 Mile Trial Run   BY TYLER DURDEN SATURDAY, SEP 11, 2021 - 08:00 PM   The world's first autonomous cargo ship, based in Japan, is facing its first real test as it gets ready to take on a 236 mile journey. It's the first step in a literal journey of a thousand miles that Japan hopes will result in half of all domestic ships eventually piloting themselves.  Japan's Nippon Foundation, a public interest organization, is backing the effort in hopes of seeing crewless ships make up 50% of Japan's local fleet by 2040,  according to Bloomberg .  The first such trial run will belong to Nippon Yusen KK, who is setting up a container ship to pilot itself from Tokyo Bay to Ise in February 2022. The 236 mile trip will be the first of its kind by an autonomous ship in heavy marine traffic. The autonomous global shipping market could be worth as much as $166 billion by 2030, the report notes. S...

Apple Slides As Judge Rules App Store Must Allow Third-Party Payments   BY TYLER DURDEN FRIDAY, SEP 10, 2021 - 11:46 AM   Update (1300ET):  Epic CEO Tim Sweeney just released a statement of his own, declaring the judge's decision "not a win for developers or consumers". * * * Update (1210ET):  Apple released a statement to the press a few minutes after the decision was released claiming it remains "committed to ensuring the App Store is a safe and trusted marketplace that supports a thriving developer community." "Today the Court has affirmed what we've known all along: the App Store is not in violation of antitrust law. As the Court recognized 'success is not illegal.' Apple faces the Court recognized 'success is not illegal.' Apple faces rigorous competition in every segment in which we do business, and we believe customers and developers choose us because our products and services are the best in the world. We r...

Media Liable For Comments Posted On Their Facebook Pages: Australian High Court   BY TYLER DURDEN WEDNESDAY, SEP 08, 2021 - 10:20 PM Authored by Daniel Y. Teng via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours) ,   In a landmark decision,  Australia’s apex judicial body, the High Court, has dismissed an appeal from major media outlets claiming they were not responsible for comments posted by readers or audience members on their social media pages. Experts believe the judgement will have wider ramifications across not just media outlets but businesses, government entities, and community organisations, who will have to moderate comments even more stringently—or remove the option altogether—to ensure defamatory comments are not publicised. The case in question revolved around Dylan Voller, a former inmate at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre. Voller sued the publishers of news outlets The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, and Sky News Australia over comments posted by indi...

TikTok Feeds Videos Promoting Sex, Drugs & Bondage To Users As Young As 13   BY TYLER DURDEN WEDNESDAY, SEP 08, 2021 - 05:05 PM   If TikTok wasn't explicitly designed to corrupt America's youth by flooding their developing brains with videos about sex and drugs, then we could certainly be forgiven for suspecting that it was. According to an in-depth analysis of TikTok's personalized "for you page" (where users encoeeunter most of the content they consume on the app),  WSJ  discovered that accounts of users as young as 13 were being fed videos about sex, kinks, porn, drug use and other topics that might unsettle parents and put ideas in the immature child's head. To carry out this analysis, WSJ created several "dummy" TikTok accounts and then monitored them as they scrolled through TikTok's endless feed, stopping to look at videos with inappropriate themes, or marked "for adults only", along the way. The WSJ feeds saw a s...