government News of 08/25/19

Vape Lung Has Claimed Its First Victim, And The CDC Is Investigating

A person has died from what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention speculate is a vaping-related condition. Nearly 200 other cases of varying severeness have been reported nationwide, described by the CDC as “severe unexplained ...

Chinese Tariff Retaliation, Presidential Tweets And Market Unease Sends Exchanges Plummeting

After a week of modest gains, major stock indexes plummeted on Friday as China retaliated against U.S. tariffs by imposing $75 billion worth of tariffs on U.S. goods coming into the country. China’s foreign ministry said that it would resume ...

India Exempts Startups From Long-Standing ‘Angel Tax’

India today addressed a long-standing challenge that has been affecting the country’s booming startup ecosystem. As part of a raft of measures to boost overall economic growth from a five-year low, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said New ...

UK’S Health Data Guardian Sets A Firm Line For App Development Using Patient Data

The UK’s health data watchdog, the National Data Guardian (NDG), has published correspondence between her office and the national privacy watchdog which informed the ICO’s finding in 2017 that a data-sharing arrangement between an NHS ...

FAA Threatens $25,000 Fine For Weaponizing Drones

It’s perfectly natural for a red-blooded American to, once they have procured their first real drone, experiment with attaching a flame thrower to it. But it turns out that this harmless hobby is frowned upon by the biggest buzzkills in the ...

FCC Approves $4.9b In Funding For Rural Broadband Improvements

The FCC has just approved nearly five billion dollars in subsidies for rural broadband operators to be paid out over the next ten years. Recipients of this windfall will have to “maintain, improve, and expand” their broadband ...

Hundreds Of Uber And Lyft Drivers To Launch A Protest Caravan Across California

If you’re like me, chances are good you just distractedly clicked on this article while scrolling through your feed in, or while waiting for, a Lyft. Maybe, like me, you need that app to get to back-to-back meetings in different locations today, as ...

The American AI Initiative: A Good First Step, Of Many

Mark Minevich Contributor Share on Twitter Mark Minevich is a digital fellow at IPsoft. The path to general AI — and possibly superintelligence — is being paved before our eyes. And with ...

States To Launch Antitrust Investigation Into Big Tech Companies, Reports Say

The state attorneys in more than a dozen states are preparing to begin an antitrust investigation of the tech giants, the Wall Street Journal  and the New York Times  reported Monday, putting the spotlight on an industry that is already facing ...

Without Evidence, Trump Accuses Google Of Manipulating Millions Of Votes

The President this morning lashed out at Google on Twitter, accusing the company of manipulating millions of votes in the 2016 election to sway it towards Hillary Clinton. The authority on which he bases this serious accusation, however, is little ...

Local Governments Are Forcing The Scooter Industry To Grow Up Fast

Gone are the days when tech companies can deploy their services in cities without any regard for rules and regulations. Before the rise of electric scooters, cities had already become hip to tech’s status quo (thanks to the likes of Uber and ...

US Cyber Command Has Publicly Posted Malware Linked To A North Korea Hacking Group

U.S. Cyber Command, the sister division of the National Security Agency focused on offensive hacking and security operations, has released a set of new   samples of malware linked to North Korean hackers. The military unit tweeted Wednesday that ...

Huawei Employees Reportedly Aided African Governments In Spying

A new report from The Wall Street Journal could be another damning piece of evidence for a company already under a good deal of international scrutiny. The paper is reporting that technicians working for Huawei helped members of government in Uganda ...

Pete Buttigieg Echoes Warren With $80b Rural Broadband Plan

Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg has unveiled his plan to address the broadband gap in this country: an $80 billion “Internet for All” initiative and set of related reforms. It echoes Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) ...

$600m Cray Supercomputer Will Tower Above The Rest — To Build Better Nukes

Cray has been commissioned by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to create a supercomputer head and shoulders above all the rest, with the contract valued at some $600 million. Disappointingly, El Capitan, as the system will be called, will be ...

Huawei’S New OS Isn’T An Android Replacement… Yet

If making an Android alternative was easy, we’d have a lot more of them. Huawei’s HarmonyOS won’t be replacing the mobile operating system for the company any time soon, and Huawei has made it pretty clear that it would much rather go back ...

How Tech Is Transforming The Intelligence Industry

Shay Hershkovitz Contributor Share on Twitter Shay Hershkovitz is a Senior Research Fellow at The Intelligence Methodology Research Center (IMRC) . At a conference on the future challenges of ...

Reports Say White House Has Drafted An Order Putting The FCC In Charge Of Monitoring Social Media

The White House is contemplating issuing an executive order that would widen its attack on the operations of social media companies. The White House has prepared an executive order called “Protecting Americans from Online Censorship” ...

Why AI Needs More Social Workers, With Columbia University’S Desmond Patton

Sometimes it does seem the entire tech industry could use someone to talk to, like a good therapist or social worker. That might sound like an insult, but I mean it mostly earnestly: I am a chaplain who has spent 15 years talking with students, ...

Facebook Could Face Billions In Potential Damages As Court Rules Facial Recognition Lawsuit Can Proceed

Facebook is facing exposure to billions of dollars in potential damages as a federal appeals court on Thursday rejected Facebook’s arguments to halt a class action lawsuit claiming it illegally collected and stored the biometric data of ...