Wednesday, January 2, 2019

Tech News

The Technocralypse (Technocracy+Apocalypse) is upon us.

Engineering the end of Capitalism - The Independent:
The new era is characterised by inefficient fossil fuel production and escalating costs of climate change. Conventional capitalist economic thinking can no longer explain, predict or solve the workings of the global economy in this new age.
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British economics journalist Paul Mason's...digital uprising is projected to consume evermore vast quantities of energy (as much as one-fifth of global electricity by 2025), producing 14 per cent of global carbon emissions by 2040.
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... the driving force of the transition to postcapitalism is the end of the age that made endless growth capitalism possible in the first place: the age of abundant, cheap energy.
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TechnocracyThe Coming Technocracy.
Here are equivalent concepts: Technocracy, Sustainable Development, Green Economy, Natural Capitalism. All of this is a grand deception[.]
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It is a scam to twist the economic resources of the world out of your hands and give them to the global elite. It is a power grab to take over all means of production while dictating to you what you are allowed to consume. It is a Scientific Dictatorship designed to control you, your thoughts, your behavior, your consumption and your family from cradle to cradle.
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Cyberwar outlook for 2019. ZD Net:
In the US, the September 2018 National Cyber Strategy adopted an aggressive stance, promising to "deter and if necessary punish those who use cyber tools for malicious purposes."
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"The [Trump] Administration recognizes that the United States is engaged in a continuous competition against strategic adversaries, rogue states, and terrorist and criminal networks. Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea all use cyberspace as a means to challenge the United States, its allies, and partners, often with a recklessness they would never consider in other domains."
Cybersecurity in 2019. Tech Crunch:
Expect more data leaks and exposures — but not just breaches.

California’s privacy rules will come to a head.

Brexit will hamper U.K. tech, startup growth.

Australia’s draconian encryption laws will begin to hurt.
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Surveillance of Your Gestures Coming Soon: Soli, by...(who else?) Google. Ivan Poupyrev, Project Soli:
Soli is a new sensing technology that uses miniature radar to detect touchless gesture interactions.

Soli sensor technology works by emitting electromagnetic waves in a broad beam. Objects within the beam scatter this energy, reflecting some portion back towards the radar antenna. Properties of the reflected signal, such as energy, time delay, and frequency shift capture rich information about the object’s characteristics and dynamics, including size, shape, orientation, material, distance, and velocity.
FCC Approves Google Gesture Tracking Soli. The Register:
...Google has received an exemption from the Federal Communication Commission that will allow the ad biz to run the system at higher power levels than regulations currently allow.

Project Soli sensors consist of hardware capable of tracking hand gestures or objects in a specific area of space. 
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UberGizmo - Electric garage door malfunction crunches Jeep.

Image from UberGizmo
According to posters on Reddit, this Jeep Wrangler was crushed when the electric garage malfunctioned due to the control unit getting flooded. This tripped the power which presumably knocked out all of the sensors which would have prevented this to happen. The malfunctioning garage kept raising the lift even as the Jeep struck the roof and was crushed.
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Computer WorldWhy MS Edge died.
EdgeHTML, in part because of its lackadaisical upgrade cadence, was rarely able to catch up, or if it did, maintain equality, with Chrome in properly rendering pages or rendering them at speed.
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TechSpotWi-Fi 6 is Near.
Wi-Fi 6 will have a single-user data rate that is 37% faster than 802.11ac, but what's more significant is that the updated specification will offer four times the throughput per user in crowded environments, as well as better power efficiency which should translate to a boost in device battery life.
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When Wi-Fi 6 is launched in full, the specification will be backward compatible with previous standards, incorporating both 2.4GHz and 5GHz along with eventually expanding that spectrum to include bands in 1GHz and 6GHz when they become available.
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Beta NewsDark Mode Chrome.
An increasing number of apps and websites are gaining dark modes, often simply for the sake of aesthetics, but also because of power-saving considerations.
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ZD NetUSB Type C for increased security.
The USB Type-C Authentication solution will include: a standard protocol of authentication for USB Type-C chargers, devices, cables, and power sources; support for authenticating over either USB data bus or USB power delivery communications channels; [and several other reasons].
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PC WorldTech that Died in 2018.
The yawn-inspiring personal assistant Facebook M stopped working in January after a general launch in April 2017. Lastly, Yahoo Messenger, one of the last remaining classic instant messengers, went away in July. Messenger outlasted its more notable rivals, AOL’s AIM (1997-2017) and MSN/Windows Live Messenger (1999-2012).

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