Sunday, January 05, 2020


Interesting design choice.
Parking Meters Are Rejecting Credit Cards in Y2K-Type Glitch
… The meters’ credit card payment software was configured to end on Jan. 1, resulting in the mass malfunction, the city’s Department of Transportation said. Parkeon, the vendor that developed the payment system, failed to update the software, officials said.
Sean Renn, a spokesman for the Flowbird Group, which owns Parkeon, said an anti-fraud security setting disabled the card payment system, causing the outage. The company provided the city with a software fix on Thursday, he added.
City workers were on sidewalks, reconfiguring the software meter by meter, Transportation Department officials said.
They said they had no estimate for how long the job would take. The city has 14,000 meters covering some 85,000 spaces.




Who will do it in 2020?
Fresh Cambridge Analytica leak ‘shows global manipulation is out of control’
An explosive leak of tens of thousands of documents from the defunct data firm Cambridge Analytica is set to expose the inner workings of the company that collapsed after the Observer revealed it had misappropriated 87 million Facebook profiles.
More than 100,000 documents relating to work in 68 countries that will lay bare the global infrastructure of an operation used to manipulate voters on “an industrial scale” are set to be released over the next months.
It comes as Christopher Steele, the ex-head of MI6’s Russia desk and the intelligence expert behind the so-called “Steele dossier” into Trump’s relationship with Russia, said that while the company had closed down, the failure to properly punish bad actors meant that the prospects for manipulation of the US election this year were even worse.
The release of documents began on New Year’s Day on an anonymous Twitter account, @HindsightFiles, with links to material on elections in Malaysia, Kenya and Brazil. The documents were revealed to have come from Brittany Kaiser, an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower, and to be the same ones subpoenaed by Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.




I fall into the two finger category.
TypingDNA raises $7 million for AI that identifies people by how they type
TypingDNA — which was founded in Romania in 2016 by Adrian Gheara, Cristian Tamas, and Techstars alum Raul Popa, and which recently moved its headquarters to New York — provides typing biometrics authentication as a service, enabling companies to recognize people by the way they type.
… TypingDNA’s platform records dynamic statistics about pressed keyboard keys and turns them into typing patterns, which its proprietary engine analyzes and verifies against patterns collected from real-world users. As Popa explains, the way a person types on a keyboard is unique and fairly difficult to replicate — in point of fact, it’s behaviorally rich enough to reveal biometric traits like gender and age.




Perspective.
S. Korea starts universal super high-speed Internet service
South Korea has started offering super high-speed Internet services for the entire country that will allow universal, convenient access to online data, the government said on Sunday.
“High-speed internet has been designated as a universal service that everyone is entitled to receive no matter where they are,” the Ministry of Science and ICT said.
… The move makes the country the eighth in the world to offer universal high-speed Internet to all citizens, but the transmission speed of 100 mega bit per second (100 Mbps) is the fastest by far, the ministry said.
The US, Spain, Switzerland, Finland, Malta, Croatia and Sweden have all introduced universal service, although the average speed offered stands at 10 Mbps for the US with many others getting access speeds of just 1-2 Mbps.



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