#057technology

Mr. Ton-That, 31, grew up a long way from Silicon Valley. In his native Australia, he was raised on tales of his royal ancestors in Vietnam. In 2007, he dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco. The iPhone had just arrived, and his goal was to get in early on what he expected would be a vibrant market for social media apps. But his early ventures never gained real traction.In 2009, Mr. Ton-That created a site that let people share links to videos with all the contacts in their instant messengers. Mr. Ton-That shut it down after it was branded a “phishing scam.” In 2015, he spun up Trump Hair, which added Mr. Trump’s distinctive coif to people in a photo, and a photo-sharing program. Both fizzled.Dispirited, Mr. Ton-That moved to New York in 2016. Tall and slender, with long black hair, he considered a modeling career, he said, but after one shoot he returned to trying to figure out the next big thing in tech. He started reading academic papers on artificial intelligence, image recognition and machine learning.Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Ton-That met in 2016 at a book event at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Mr. Schwartz, now 61, had amassed an impressive Rolodex working for Mr. Giuliani in the 1990s and serving as the editorial page editor of The New York Daily News in the early 2000s. The two soon decided to go into the facial recognition business together: Mr. Ton-That would build the app, and Mr. Schwartz would use his contacts to drum up commercial interest.Police departments have had access to facial recognition tools for almost 20 years, but they have historically been limited to searching government-provided images, such as mug shots and driver’s license photos. In recent years, facial recognition algorithms have improved in accuracy, and companies like Amazon offer products that can create a facial recognition program for any database of images.Mr. Ton-That wanted to go way beyond that. He began in 2016 by recruiting a couple of engineers. One helped design a program that can automatically collect images of people’s faces from across the internet, such as employment sites, news sites, educational sites, and social networks including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and even Venmo. Representatives of those companies said their policies prohibit such scraping, and Twitter said it explicitly banned use of its data for facial recognition. Read the full article

Popular smartphone apps including Spotify and Pinterest suffered outages Friday for a few hours due to a bug in Facebook's systems.Facebook has resolved the problem, a spokesperson said."Earlier today, a code change triggered crashes for some iOS apps using the Facebook SDK," or software development kit, the spokesperson said."We identified the issue quickly and resolved it. We apologise for any inconvenience."App users began reporting on Twitter early Friday that they were unable to open Spotify and other sites.Downdetector, which monitors for internet problems in real time, showed a rise in problems for a number of applications, including Spotify, Pinterest, Waze, and The New York Times.It reported a major spike in problems around 10:30am GMT (4pm IST), and a decline in user issues at around 1pm GMT (6:30pm IST).In 2020, will WhatsApp get the killer feature that every Indian is waiting for? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below. Read the full article

If any place was prepared for quarantine, it was Milton Keynes. Two years before the pandemic, a start-up called Starship Technologies deployed a fleet of rolling delivery robots in the small city about 50 miles northwest of London.The squat six-wheeled robots shuttled groceries and dinner orders to homes and offices. As the coronavirus spread, Starship shifted the fleet even further into grocery deliveries. Locals like Emma Maslin could buy from the corner store with no human contact.“There’s no social interaction with a robot,” Ms. Maslin said.The sudden usefulness of the robots to people staying in their homes is a tantalizing hint of what the machines could one day accomplish — at least under ideal conditions. Milton Keynes, with a population of 270,000 and a vast network of bicycle paths, is perfectly suited to rolling robots. Demand has been so high in recent weeks, some residents have spent days trying to schedule a delivery.In recent years, companies from Silicon Valley to Somerville, Mass., have poured billions of dollars into the development of everything from self-driving cars to warehouse robots. The technology is rapidly improving. Robots can help with deliveries, transportation, recycling, manufacturing.But even simple tasks like robotic delivery still face myriad technical and logistical hurdles. The robots in Milton Keynes, for example, can carry no more than two bags of groceries.“You can’t do a big shop,” Ms. Maslin said. “They aren’t delivering from the superstores.”A pandemic may add to demand but does not change what you can deploy, said Elliot Katz, who helps run Phantom Auto, a start-up that helps companies remotely control autonomous vehicles when they encounter situations they cannot navigate on their own.“There is a limit to what a delivery bot can bring to a human,” Mr. Katz said. “But you have to start somewhere.”Industry veterans know this well. Gabe Sibley, an engineer and a professor who previously worked with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, started Zippy for sidewalk deliveries in 2017. But the San Francisco company quickly ran into challenges. The robots could move only at the pace of walking, around 1 mile per hour. That severely limits the delivery area, particularly for hot food, Mr. Sibley said.The company never deployed any robots, selling in 2018.“In this country, where we designed our cities around the car, the solution to sidewalk delivery is to use the roads,” Mr. Sibley said.Founded in 2014 and backed by more than $80 million, Starship Technologies is based in San Francisco, and it has deployed most of its robots on college campuses in the United States. Equipped with cameras, radar and other sensors, the robots navigate by matching their surroundings to digital maps built by the company in each new location.The company chose Milton Keynes for a wider deployment in part because the robots could navigate it with relative ease. Built after World War II, the city was carefully planned, with most streets laid out in a grid and bicycle and pedestrian paths, called “redways,” running beside them.When the Starship robots first arrived in Milton Keynes, one of the fastest-growing cities in Britain, Liss Page thought they were cute but pointless. “The first time I met one, it was stuck on the curb outside my house,” she said.Then, in early April, she opened a letter from the National Health Service advising her not to leave the house because her asthma and other conditions made her particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus. In the weeks that followed, the robots provided a much-needed connection to the outside world.Smaller deliveries suit Ms. Page because she lives alone. A longtime vegan, she can order nut milk and margarine straight to her door. But like the grocery vans that deliver larger orders across the city, the Starship robots are ultimately limited by what is on the shelves.“You pad out the order with things you don’t really need to make the delivery charge worthwhile,” Ms. Page said. “With the last delivery, all I got were the things I didn’t really need.”Residents like Ms. Page set deliveries through a smartphone app. They typically pay a British pound (about $1.20) for each delivery, but in Milton Keynes, Starship has raised the price to as much as £2 during the busiest times so more people will shop in off hours.The robots deliver groceries to doctors, nurses and other employees of the N.H.S. for free. They even join the Thursday night tribute to the N.H.S., blinking their headlights as residents clap and cheer from their doorsteps. The fleet of 80 robots will soon expand to 100.Though this may be the most extensive deployment of delivery robots in the world, others have popped up in recent years. In Christiansburg, Va., Paul and Susie Sensmeier can arrange drugstore and bakery deliveries via flying drone. Wing, which is a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has been offering drone deliveries in the area since the fall.They can order penne pasta, marinara sauce and toilet paper. But they can’t order prescription medicines via Wing — the drones are stocked at a Wing warehouse, not at a drugstore — and like the robots in Milton Keynes, the drones can carry only so much.“I can only get two muffins or two croissants,” Susie Sensmeier, 81, said.Companies like Wing and Starship hope they can expand the reach of these services and refine their skills. Now there is new impetus.“Overnight, delivery has gone from a convenience to a vital service,” said Starship’s chief executive, Lex Bayer. “Our fleets are driving nonstop, 14 hours a day.”In Milton Keynes, Starship has gradually expanded the reach of its service, doubling its fleet and teaming up with several new grocery stores. It recently started a service in Chevy Chase, Md., not far from Washington. The company can create digital maps for the robots in days.Ms. Page, a 51-year-old business analyst who has lived in Milton Keynes for more than a quarter-century, believes the service can become a viable business.“It just seemed like a vanity project before,” she said. “The pandemic has given them a platform to launch a real business.”But as much as the pandemic has lifted start-ups like Starship, it has also hurt them. Many of the college campuses where Starship deployed its robots have shut down. Though the company has worked to shift those robots to nearby locations, it has been forced to lay off employees and contractors. Janel Steinberg, a company spokeswoman, said the cuts were “primarily about rebalancing our work force to adapt to the demand in different locations.”Nuro, a start-up in Silicon Valley, has long promised larger robots that can drive on public roads. But it has not yet deployed these robots, and like most self-driving car companies, Nuro has been forced to curtail its testing. Rather than making deliveries, its robots are shuttling supplies across an old basketball stadium in Sacramento that has been converted into a temporary hospital.Sidewalk robots and flying drones also require human help. Starship and similar companies must monitor the progress of each robot from afar, and if anything goes wrong, remote operators take over. With social distancing, that has become more difficult. Remote operators who once worked in call centers have moved into their homes.Mr. Katz’s company, Phantom Auto, is now helping companies make the transition. “This is a very, very difficult problem to solve,” Mr. Katz said. “We are in the autonomy-doesn’t-quite-work-yet business.” Read the full article

The official poster for Betaal Photo Credit: Netflix Can Netflix force Bollywood to reinvent itself? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS. You can also download the episode or just hit the play button below. Read the full article

Few products today are as deeply entwined with a person’s brand as Tesla is with Mr. Musk, and so his comments can feel personal for Tesla drivers.“As a Tesla owner, a 47-year-old male recovering from Covid-19, and someone very concerned simultaneously about the environment, the economy, my kids’ and my parents’ future, this ain’t great,” said Jeff Guilfoyle, a product manager at FireEye in San Diego. “This disease is no joke, and the long-term health impacts are unknown for survivors.”Many have implored Mr. Musk online to stop.Raja Sohail Abbas, the chief executive of an outpatient psychiatric clinic in Allentown, Pa., wrote: “I am a Tesla owner and love the company. You have to stop being an idiot about this.”“Tesla owner and Fan here, but this was a disappointing tweet despite the frustrations of and holdups,” added Alex Goodchild, a D.J. in Brooklyn. “Words are weapons especially when used during situations like the one we’re currently experiencing. You sound just like Trump in this tweet.”The debate has riven the Tesla community.“The last two months, there’s been this polarization in the Elon Musk fan club,” said Paula Timothy-Mellon, a technology consultant who moderates that LinkedIn-based fan club, which has 22,000 members. “There are those who are believers in these California guidelines and there are those in favor of his push to re-open Tesla.”Driving a Tesla often carries great symbolism for the owner (and observers).“If you own a Tesla, you feel you are directly connected to Elon Musk and people think that Tesla owners are directly connected to the politics of the C.E.O.,” said Sam Kelly, a Tesla owner and investor based in Spain who posts under the name SamTalksTesla.He added that he did not think the red pill comment meant any big new political awakening from Mr. Musk.Asked to explain his thinking, Mr. Musk pasted an image of the Urban Dictionary definition of red pill in an email. It read:“‘Red pill’ has become a popular phrase among cyberculture and signifies a free-thinking attitude, and a waking up from a ‘normal’ life of sloth and ignorance. Red pills prefer the truth, no matter how gritty and painful it may be.” Read the full article

Amazon responded to lawmakers on Friday who demanded that its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, testify as part of a congressional antitrust investigation.The company told lawmakers in a letter that it would be happy to send someone. It never, however, mentions Mr. Bezos in the three-page letter, which was obtained by The New York Times.Instead, the company said that it was “prepared to make the appropriate Amazon executive available to the Committee to address these important issues.”By not promising an appearance by Mr. Bezos, Amazon’s response may escalate tensions with the Democrat leaders of the House Judiciary Committee who, along with some Republicans, requested Mr. Bezos’ testimony in a letter sent to the company on May 1. They have threatened to legally compel Mr. Bezos to appear before the panel if he does not agree to do so willingly.“We appreciate the response,” Representative David Cicilline, the Rhode Island Democrat who is chairman of the panel’s antitrust subcommittee, said in a statement. “As we said in our letter, we expect Mr. Bezos to testify when called and to fully cooperate with this investigation.”Should Mr. Bezos appear before the committee, he would probably face questions about accusations that the company abuses its market power, as well as issues like its treatment of warehouse workers and its impact on small businesses. Unlike most other top technology executives, Mr. Bezos has not testified before Congress.“We also fully appreciate your interest in hearing from Amazon leaders regarding these issues and any other issue material to your investigation into competition in digital markets, including at any future hearing,” Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president of public policy, said in the Friday letter.The lawmakers had talked with the company before the formal letter was sent about arranging Mr. Bezos’ testimony, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. The company has been resistant to the request, said the people, who spoke anonymously because the talks were private.The Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee has been conducting an inquiry into possible antitrust abuses by Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple for months. It has heard from representatives of the companies and last year requested reams of documents from the firms, including Mr. Bezos’ communications.Its tensions with Amazon have ratcheted up in recent weeks, after a Wall Street Journal report that suggested an Amazon lawyer had given a misleading answer to the committee at a hearing last year. Lawmakers have raised the prospect that they could refer the lawyer, Nate Sutton, for a possible criminal investigation.In its letter on Friday, Amazon denied that Mr. Sutton had misled the panel.“We disagree strongly with any suggestion that we have attempted to mislead the Committee or not been cooperative with the investigation,” the company wrote. Read the full article

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is planning to file antitrust charges against Google as early as this summer, said two people with knowledge of the situation, in what would be one of the biggest antitrust actions by the United States since the late 1990s.The Justice Department is still investigating the internet company and has been making progress on its case, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details were confidential. The regulators are focused on Google’s dominance in the online advertising industry, and the case will also involve allegations that the company abused its dominant position in online search to harm competitors, the people said.State attorneys general are likely to file their own antitrust lawsuit against Google or join the Justice Department case sometime this year, said a person with knowledge of the state investigation.Taken together, such actions against Google, which controls around 90 percent of all web searches globally, would be one of the biggest antitrust cases in the United States since the 1990s when the Justice Department joined 20 states to sue Microsoft. The two sides reached a settlement in 2001.The moves would also set a benchmark for how regulators and lawmakers proceed with investigations into other large tech companies such as Facebook and Amazon, which the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general and Congress are scrutinizing for their market power and corporate behavior. For nearly two decades, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and others have grown with little regulation from American authorities, becoming gateways to internet search, advertising, online communications, digital entertainment and e-commerce.The plans by the Justice Department and state attorneys general were earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal.Google said it was continuing to engage in the various investigations. “We don’t have any updates or comments on speculation,” the company said. ”Our focus is firmly on providing services that help consumers, support thousands of businesses, and enable increased choice and competition.”The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, who is leading the states’ investigation, pointed to his previous comments that the states hoped the investigation would wrap up by this fall.The Justice Department began exploring whether to open a case against Google for potential antitrust violations last year. Attorney General William P. Barr has since stated publicly that he would like the department to decide by the summer whether to bring charges.As part of its inquiry, the Justice Department has spent months interviewing Google’s competitors in the areas of search, advertising technology and news publishers, seeking information about the company’s business practices.Last year, the states sent a detailed request for information, known as a civil investigative demand, asking Google to answer questions about its advertising technology business. The company and the State of Texas reached a deal earlier this year that would allow the states to gain access to key documents. In March, they discussed options to allow the states to share information with the Justice Department, according to documents obtained through a public records request.Google captures roughly one-third of every dollar spent in online advertising. Its search engine is the on-ramp to the internet and controls what information users see, while the company owns many of the critical tools and technologies used to advertise online. It also boasts seven businesses with more than one billion users.Antitrust scrutiny has been one of the prominent issues hanging over Google. But as the investigations have ramped up, the Silicon Valley company has played down the concerns about regulatory actions, noting that it has been investigated before and emphasizing how consumers are satisfied users of its products.In past investigations by U.S. regulators, Google did not end up facing charges. In 2013, the F.T.C. decided to wrap up a 19-month investigation without charging the company of violating antitrust laws. At the time, some staff members at the agency felt that there was sufficient evidence to press forward with a case, but the commissioners voted unanimously to close the matter.Cecilia Kang and David McCabe reported from Washington and Daisuke Wakabayashi from Oakland, Calif. Steve Lohr contributed reporting from New York. Read the full article

Facebook and a team of African and global telecom majors have struck a deal to build one of the world's largest subsea cable networks, boosting internet availability across three continents, they said in a joint statement on Thursday.South Africa's MTN GlobalConnect and Mauritius-based infrastructure provider WIOCC are partners in the project, along with China Mobile International, French telecoms major Orange SA, Saudi Arabia's stc, Telecom Egypt, and Vodafone.The project, called 2Africa, aims to build 37,000 kilometres of subsea cable infrastructure which will directly connect countries around the African coast to Europe and the Middle East, according to its website.The network will have a design capacity of up to 150 terabytes per second (Tbps) on key parts of the system, the site said. The 11 new cables rolled out between 2009 and 2016 in sub-Saharan Africa provided around 70Tbps of design capacity.Subsea infrastructure provider Alcatel Submarine Networks will build the project, which is expected to be operational by 2023/24, the statement said. The companies did not reveal how much money they were investing."2Africa... will interconnect Europe, the Middle East, and 21 landings in 16 countries in Africa," the partners said in the statement.Subsea cables form the backbone of the internet, carrying 99 percent of the world's data traffic.Africa's big economies have a large and fast growing population of internet users, with growth in internet use fuelled by rapidly expanding mobile broadband networks and ever more affordable phones.However, with a population of 1.3 billion, Africa is still a laggard in internet connectivity, with average internet penetration at around 39 percent against a world average of 59 percent.On completion the subsea network will deliver more than the total combined capacity of all subsea cables serving Africa today, the firms said in the statement."Improving connectivity for Africa is a significant step which lays the groundwork for increased digitalisation across the continent," said Vodacom International Business Chief Officer Diego Gutierrez.Vodacom, which is majority owned by Britain's Vodafone, is South Africa's second biggest telecom player.© Thomson Reuters 2020 Read the full article