Daily Archives: August 20, 2019

facial recognition ‘epidemic’ across UK private sites in conjunction with the police

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Facial recognition is being extensively deployed on privately owned sites across the UK, according to an investigation by civil liberties group Big Brother Watch.

It found an “epidemic” of the controversial technology across major property developers, shopping centres, museums, conference centres and casinos in the UK.

The investigation uncovered live facial recognition in Sheffield’s major shopping centre Meadowhall.

Site owner British Land said: “We do not operate facial recognition at any of our assets. However, over a year ago we conducted a short trial at Meadowhall, in conjunction with the police, and all data was deleted immediately after the trial.”

The investigation also revealed that Liverpool’s World Museum scanned visitors with facial recognition surveillance during its exhibition, “China’s First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors” in 2018.

The museum’s operator, National Museums Liverpool, said this had been done because there had been a “heightened security risk” at the time. It said it had sought “advice from Merseyside Police and local counter-terrorism advisors” and that use of the technology “was clearly communicated in signage around the venue”.

A spokesperson added: “World Museum did not receive any complaints and it is no longer in use. Any use of similar technology in the future would be in accordance with National Museums Liverpool’s standard operating procedures and with good practice guidance issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office.”

Big Brother Watch said it also found the Millennium Point conference centre in Birmingham was using facial-recognition surveillance “at the request of law enforcement”. In the privacy policy on Millennium Point’s website, it confirms it does “sometimes use facial recognition software at the request of law enforcement authorities”. It has not responded to a request for further comment.

Earlier this week it emerged the privately owned Kings Cross estate in London was using facial recognition, and Canary Wharf is considering following suit.

Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham has since launched an investigation, saying she remains “deeply concerned about the growing use of facial recognition technology in public spaces, not only by law enforcement agencies but also increasingly by the private sector”.

The Metropolitan Police’s use of the tech was recently slammed as highly inaccurate and “unlawful”, according to an independent report by researchers from the University of Essex.

Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “There is an epidemic of facial recognition in the UK.

“The collusion between police and private companies in building these surveillance nets around popular spaces is deeply disturbing. Facial recognition is the perfect tool of oppression and the widespread use we’ve found indicates we’re facing a privacy emergency.

“We now know that many millions of innocent people will have had their faces scanned with this surveillance without knowing about it, whether by police or by private companies.

“The idea of a British museum secretly scanning the faces of children visiting an exhibition on the first emperor of China is chilling. There is a dark irony that this authoritarian surveillance tool is rarely seen outside of China.”

Carlo urged Parliament to follow in the footsteps of legislators in the US and “ban this authoritarian surveillance from public spaces”. ®

Source: And you thought the cops were bad… Civil rights group warns of facial recog ‘epidemic’ across UK private sites • The Register

YouTube shuts down music companies’ use of manual copyright claims to steal creator revenue, troll block videos

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Going forward, copyright owners will no longer be able to monetize creator videos with very short or unintentional uses of music via YouTube’s “Manual Claiming” tool. Instead, they can choose to prevent the other party from monetizing the video or they can block the content. However, YouTube expects that by removing the option to monetize these sorts of videos themselves, some copyright holders will instead just leave them alone.

“One concerning trend we’ve seen is aggressive manual claiming of very short music clips used in monetized videos. These claims can feel particularly unfair, as they transfer all revenue from the creator to the claimant, regardless of the amount of music claimed,” explained YouTube in a blog post.

To be clear, the changes only involve YouTube’s Manual Claiming tool which is not how the majority of copyright violations are handled today. Instead, the majority of claims are created through YouTube’s Content ID match system. This system scans videos uploaded to YouTube against a database of files submitted to the site by copyright owners. Then, when a match is found, the copyright holder owner can choose to block the video or monetize it themselves, and track the video’s viewership stats.

The Manual Claiming tool, on the other hand, is only offered to partners who understand how Content ID works. It allows them to search through publicly available YouTube videos to look for those containing their content and apply a claim when a match is found.

The problem with the Manual Claiming policy is that it was impacting creator content even when the use of the claimed music in videos was very short — even a second long — or unintentional. For example, a creator who was vlogging may have walked past a store that was playing the copyrighted song, but then could lose the revenue from their video as a result.

In April, YouTube said it was looking to address this problem. And just ahead of this year’s VidCon, YouTube announced several well-received changes to the Manual Claiming Policy. It began to require that copyright owners specify the timestamp in the video where the claim occurs — a change that YouTube hoped would create additional friction and cut down on abuse.

Creators were also given tools of their own that let them easily remove the clip or replace the infringing content with free-to-use tracks.

These newly announced changes go even further as they remove the ability for the copyright owner to monetize the infringing video at all. Copyright holders can now only prevent the creators themselves from monetizing the video, or they can block the content. However, given the new creator tools for handling infringing content, it’s likely that creators in those situations would just address the problem content in order to keep their video online.

Source: YouTube shuts down music companies’ use of manual copyright claims to steal creator revenue | TechCrunch

This piece shows you how insane the copyright system is (if you walk past a shop playing some music you can consider it an infringement!) and how the large music maffia can muscle out small players – just calling something an infringement leads to a kafka-esque system where you can’t appeal easily. It’s a good thing that this muscling is now no longer easy to do and so automated.

UPS Has Been Delivering Cargo in Self-Driving Trucks for Months (with 2 people on board)

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The self-driving freight truck startup TuSimple has been carrying mail across the state of Arizona for several weeks.

UPS announced on Thursday that its venture capital arm has made a minority investment in TuSimple. The announcement also revealed that since May TuSimple autonomous trucks have been hauling UPS loads on a 115-mile route between Phoenix and Tucson.

UPS confirmed to Gizmodo this is the first time UPS has announced it has been using TuSimple autonomous trucks to deliver packages in the state.

Around the same time as the UPS and TuSimple program began, the United States Postal Service and TuSimple publicized a two-week pilot program to deliver mail between Phoenix and Dallas, a 1,000 mile trip.

TuSimple claims it can cut the average cost of shipping in a tractor-trailer by 30 percent. In an announcement about the new partnership, UPS Ventures managing partner, Todd Lewis, said the venture arm “collaborates with startups to explore new technologies and tailor them to help meet our specific needs.”

UPS would not share the terms of the deal with Gizmodo. TuSimple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As the Verge reports, TuSimple puts its own autonomous tech—which relies on nine cameras and two LIDAR sensors—in Navistar vehicles.

The partnership announcement states that TuSimple has been helping UPS understand how to get to Level 4 autonomous driving where a vehicle is fully autonomous and able to reach a particular location. At this point, the TuSimple trucks carrying packages for UPS still have an engineer and a safety driver riding along. When UPS reaches Level 4, it won’t need anyone behind the wheel.

Source: UPS Has Been Delivering Cargo in Self-Driving Trucks for Months And No One Knew

Researchers build a heat shield just 10 atoms thick to protect electronic devices

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Excess heat given off by smartphones, laptops and other electronic devices can be annoying, but beyond that it contributes to malfunctions and, in extreme cases, can even cause lithium batteries to explode.

To guard against such ills, engineers often insert glass, plastic or even layers of air as insulation to prevent heat-generating components like microprocessors from causing damage or discomforting users.

Now, Stanford researchers have shown that a few layers of atomically , stacked like sheets of paper atop hot spots, can provide the same insulation as a sheet of glass 100 times thicker. In the near term, thinner heat shields will enable engineers to make even more compact than those we have today, said Eric Pop, professor of electrical engineering and senior author of a paper published Aug. 16 in Science Advances.

[…]

To make nanoscale heat shields practical, the researchers will have to find some mass production technique to spray or otherwise deposit atom-thin layers of materials onto electronic components during manufacturing. But behind the immediate goal of developing thinner insulators looms a larger ambition: Scientists hope to one day control the vibrational energy inside materials the way they now control electricity and light. As they come to understand the heat in solid objects as a form of sound, a new field of phononics is emerging, a name taken from the Greek root word behind telephone, phonograph and phonetics.

“As engineers, we know quite a lot about how to control electricity, and we’re getting better with light, but we’re just starting to understand how to manipulate the high-frequency sound that manifests itself as at the atomic scale,” Pop said.

Source: Researchers build a heat shield just 10 atoms thick to protect electronic devices