Zajímavé aktuální zahraniční články

[Nikezeus]

"China built a lab to study SARS and Ebola in Wuhan - and US biosafety experts warned in 2017 that a virus could 'escape' the facility that's become key in fighting the outbreak"

" The Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory is the only lab in China designated for studying dangerous pathogens like SARS and Ebola
Ahead of its January 2018 opening, biosafety experts and scientists from the US expressed concerns that a virus could escape the lab
In 2004, a SARS virus 'leaked' from a lab in Beijing
Experts say the coronavirus that's infected more than 800 people mutated in animals and became capable of infecting humans at the Wuhan seafood market
But a 2017 article warned of the unpredictability of lab animals that scientists at the Wuhan lab intended to inject with viruses
"
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/arti ... enter.html

[Michael.Polak]

Frustration grows in China as face masks compromise facial recognition
https://qz.com/1796833/coronavirus-face ... n-cameras/

As millions don masks across the country, the Chinese are discovering an unexpected consequence to covering their faces. It turns out that face masks trip up facial recognition-based functions, a technology necessary for many routine transactions in China. Suddenly, certain mobile phones, condominium doors, and bank accounts won’t unlock with a glance.
...
Most complaints are about unlocking mobile devices. Apple confirmed to Quartz that an unobstructed view of a user’s eyes, nose, and mouth is needed for FaceID to work properly. Similarly, Huawei says that its efforts to develop a feature that recognizes partially-covered faces has fallen short. “There are too few feature points for the eyes and the head so it’s impossible to ensure security,” explains Huawei vice president Bruce Lee, in a Jan 21 post on Weibo.”We gave up on facial unlock for mask or scarf wearing [users].”

[davkol]

Welcome to the Bullshit Economy

The Iowa caucus disaster is a function of a broken economic structure that rewards con artistry over competence.

David Dayen
February 4, 2020
The American Prospect

New Details Show How Deeply Iowa Caucus App Developer Was Embedded in Democratic Establishment

Democratic operative Tara McGowan is denying that her high-profile liberal firm ACRONYM played a role in the Monday evening caucus debacle, claiming that her firm was merely an investor in the company Shadow Inc., which developed the app at the center of the controversy. But internal company documents, a source close to the firms, and public records show a close and intertwined relationship between Acronym and Shadow.

Lee Fang
February 4, 2020
The Intercept

Why the Shadow Inc. App Failed

Building an app is more than shipping some code and telling people to use it. It is adding a new factor to a complex social system. It requires planning, training, and care. And yet the Shadow Inc. app used in the Iowa caucuses was built and shipped in three months.

…

Finally, Spoke was developed by Saikat Chakrabarti and Sheena Pakanati for Bernie’s 2016 campaign as well, and it’s now maintained by MoveOn. Spoke, in contrast to Hustle and GetThru, is open source and freely available. Chakrabarti himself emerged as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff until 2019. However, this is not to naively suggest that just by making technology open source, it will be successful. It is not clear how widespread the use of the tool is, and whether campaigns can commit resources to developing, hosting, and securing their own installations of it.

In the twentieth century, social movements committed themselves to building the infrastructure needed for reproducing themselves. In the twenty-first century, they must commit to working out how to do the same in a new digital context. There are no easy answers. In examining a case like the Iowa caucuses, we can begin by asking the right questions, and also turn to considering them outside of electoral cycles.

We need to examine the issues of infrastructure more broadly: looking at the appropriateness of technology to certain political tasks, and the funding models and institutional forms that underpin them.

February 6, 2020
Jacobin

Why Iowa happened and why government websites suck

The democratic caucus fiasco in Iowa is an example of an important thing: Civic orgs, like the DNC or the government, need to stop using private contracting companies to build their closed source software. Democracy is at stake.

Aslan French
February 5, 2020
Medium

An ‘Off-the-Shelf, Skeleton Project’: Experts Analyze the App That Broke Iowa

Multiple experts analyzed Shadow Inc.’s Iowa caucus app. They found all kinds of problems.

Jason Koebler, Joseph Cox a Emanuel Maiberg
February 5, 2020
Motherboard (Vice)

The Iowa Caucuses App Had Another Problem: It Could Have Been Hacked

While there is no evidence hackers intercepted or tampered with the results, a security firm consulted by ProPublica found that the app lacks key safeguards.

Jack Gillum, Jessica Huseman
February 5, 2020
ProPublica

[davkol]

Russian Anti-Fascists Jailed on Terror Charges Despite Outcry

A court in central Russia has jailed members of an anti-fascist activist group for up to 18 years on terrorism charges, the Mediazona news website reported Monday.

Seven members of the group Set — Russian for “Network” — were detained in the city of Penza along with four other members in St. Petersburg in 2017. Investigators claim that they planned attacks during the 2018 presidential election and the football World Cup, while rights groups say that the case is “fabricated” and based on testimonies obtained through torture.

…

The jailed activists have accused security officers of torturing them into incriminating themselves. Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) responded to the allegations by saying it was a “professional necessity.”

…

February 11, 2020
The Moscow Times

[davkol]

How Europe Turned Into a Perfect Landscape for Wildfires

…

In a hotter, drier, more flammable climate, like here in the Mediterranean region, forests can die slowly from drought or they can go up in flames almost instantly, releasing all the carbon stored in their trunks and branches into the atmosphere.

That raises an increasingly urgent question: How best to manage woodlands in a world that humans have so profoundly altered? “We need to decide what will be the climate-change forest for the future,” is how Kirsten Thonicke, a fire ecologist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, framed the challenge.

A forest revival in Europe is forcing that discussion now.

Today roughly 40 percent of the European Union’s landmass is covered by trees, making it one of the most forest-rich regions in the world. It’s also ripe for wildfire.

In 2019, intense heat and drought helped spread fires across roughly 1,300 square miles on the Continent, a swath of scorched land 15 percent bigger than the decade’s annual average, according to preliminary data issued in mid-January by the European Forest Fire Information System.

…

In Europe last year, wildfires raged as far north as Sweden. Drought and beetle infestations killed swaths of forests in Germany, prompting a debate over what trees to plant in their place. Britain had more wildfires last year than ever before on record. Spain saw one of the sharpest increases in the number of individual fires. The European Union described forest fires as “a serious and increasing threat.”

…

The only way to keep the woods from becoming dry brush by the time his two children are grown, he said, is to manage the landscape. He can see what climate change has already wrought on the hills he has lived in his whole life. The seasons are unpredictable. The heat and high winds are like nothing he has seen before.

…

Somini Sengupta
February 5, 2020
The New York Times

[Milus.Kotisova]

Guantanamo, rok 2020:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2 ... ls-torture

Aside from questions of ethics and morality, torture is illegal. It’s also ineffective. [...]

Apart from being ineffective, torture is often counterproductive. Many of the detainees subjected to it simply lied to get it to stop. For instance, a detainee named Abu Zubaydah, a Guantanamo detainee who was subjected to lengthy torture, gave false statements about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that were subsequently used to justify the 2003 U.S. invasion of the country. [...] Others have waited nearly two decades without their day in court. One such person is my client, a Malaysian named Nazir Bin Lep, who has been held in black sites and Guantanamo for over 16 years. For the first three, he was severely tortured. He is suspected of having been tangentially involved in attacks in Indonesia in 2002 and 2003, but has never been charged. While these were tragic and devastating crimes, there is no evidence that he planned or carried them out, or even that he knew anything about them. Furthermore, he had nothing to do with 9/11, the Cole bombing, or any attack on the United States.

[Dalibor.Zahora]

Tyto země si myslí, že kapitalismus způsobuje více škody než užitku

These countries think capitalism does more harm than good
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/ ... al-systems

[davkol]

The Trump Effect: An Experimental Investigation of the Emboldening Effect of Racially Inflammatory Elite Communication

This article explores the effect of explicitly racial and inflammatory speech by political elites on mass citizens in a societal context where equality norms are widespread and generally heeded yet a subset of citizens nonetheless possesses deeply ingrained racial prejudices. The authors argue that such speech should have an ‘emboldening effect’ among the prejudiced, particularly where it is not clearly and strongly condemned by other elite political actors. To test this argument, the study focuses on the case of the Trump campaign for president in the United States, and utilizes a survey experiment embedded within an online panel study. The results demonstrate that in the absence of prejudiced elite speech, prejudiced citizens constrain the expression of their prejudice. However, in the presence of prejudiced elite speech – particularly when it is tacitly condoned by other elites – the study finds that the prejudiced are emboldened to both express and act upon their prejudices.

Newman, B., Merolla, J., Shah, S., Lemi, D., Collingwood, L., & Ramakrishnan, S. (n.d.).
British Journal of Political Science, 1-22.
doi:10.1017/S0007123419000590

[Nikezeus]

"Billionaire Whistleblower: Wuhan Coronavirus Death Toll Is Over 50,000

Exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui recently revealed leaks from Wuhan crematoriums. He claims based on the number of bodies their furnaces are burning, the death toll could be as high as 50,000.

The official coronavirus death toll in China is a little over 800. But an exiled Chinese businessman says crematoriums are leaking the real figure.
A billionaire whistleblower alleges Wuhan has crematoriums working 24/7. He claims they’ve cremated some 50,000 coronavirus victims.
"
https://www.ccn.com/billionaire-whistle ... ver-50000/

[davkol]

Leaked Reports Show EU Police Are Planning a Pan-European Network of Facial Recognition Databases

…

According to leaked internal European Union documents, the EU could soon be creating a network of national police facial recognition databases. A report drawn up by the national police forces of 10 EU member states, led by Austria, calls for the introduction of EU legislation to introduce and interconnect such databases in every member state. The report, which The Intercept obtained from a European official who is concerned about the network’s development, was circulated among EU and national officials in November 2019. If previous data-sharing arrangements are a guide, the new facial recognition network will likely be connected to similar databases in the U.S., creating what privacy researchers are calling a massive transatlantic consolidation of biometric data.

The report was produced as part of discussions on expanding the Prüm system, an EU-wide initiative connecting DNA, fingerprint, and vehicle registration databases for mutual searching. A similar system exists between the U.S. and any country that is part of the Visa Waiver Program, which includes the majority of EU countries; bilateral agreements allow U.S. and European agencies to access one another’s fingerprint and DNA databases.

…

As far back as 2004, the U.S. Embassy in Brussels was calling for a relationship with the EU that allowed “expansive exchanges and sharing all forms of data, including personal data.” In recent years, efforts toward that goal have intensified. According to a Government Accountability Office report, in 2015, the Department of Homeland Security began demanding the implementation of the data-sharing agreements required of Visa Waiver Program countries. This has included the FBI providing assistance to other states to set up the necessary computer networks.

…

The report by 10 police forces calls for Europol, the EU agency for police information and intelligence sharing, to play a role in exchanging facial recognition and other biometric data with non-EU states. This echoes recommendations from European governments themselves: A July 2018 declaration called for the commission to consider “broadening the scope” of the Prüm network and for Europol to take the lead on data sharing with third countries.

…

Zach Campbell, Chris Jones
February 21, 2020
The Intercept