Though it makes popular and groundbreaking electric vehicles, Tesla has had a less than stellar track record when it comes to the company's more ambitious future-facing projects. CEO Elon Musk's 2019 promise of unleashing a million autonomous "robotaxis" onto America's streets and highways has failed to materialize while the "full self-driving" technology that promise was premised on has failed drivers with such stunning regularity that the NHTSA has launched a federal investigation into it. So are we to believe that the same man whose company once designed a cut-rate mini-submarine and tried to distribute knock-off ventilators is capable of building a fully-functional robot prototype within the year?
Music publishers have been on a spending spree in recent years, buying the catalogs and copyrights for songs of famous musicians at a frantic pace. Last December, Universal Music Publishing Group bought up Bob Dylan’s entire discography in a deal estimated at more than $300 million. Similarly, Stevie Nicks sold an 80 percent share of her works to Primary Wave Music for an estimated $100 million that same month. But as all this money changes hands for the industry’s biggest stars, one songwriting startup has plans to open the firehose of music royalties to the everyman.
“You see these huge deals, like the Bob Dylan deal with the publishing rights and all this money,” Alex Mitchell, co-founder and CEO of Boomy told Engadget. “It started with a recognition that most people are going to be left out of that and it caused us to have a conversation about equity in the music industry, 'how do we fairly remunerate artists, what's the role of labels,' there's just chaos happening in the music industry right now.”
Mitchell realized that one major obstacle keeping amateur musicians from becoming published musicians was a technological one. Setting up a home recording studio is no small task, and teaching oneself how to navigate the hyper-granular control schemes of professional-grade DAWs (digital audio workstations) like Ableton Live or Pro Tools can take months, if not years, to fully master. But what if you had an AI-based co-writer to handle the heavy technical lifting instead, similar to what Tik Tok and Instagram do for their creators?
“We really started looking at what it takes to draw creativity out of somebody, what kind of tool can you put in their hands — where there's so much of the process that's semi- or fully-automated — that they can just add their own layer of humanity to it.” What they came up with was Boomy.
“There's already AI being used in studios and in the music creation process,” Mitchell said. “A great example of this is Ozone auto-mastering. They have used artificial intelligence to be able to create great mixes, put great final polish on tracks, things like that.”
“So what we've done is we've taken a lot of those concepts and we've rewritten this stuff from the ground up,” he continued. “[It’s] less to think about how people usually make music, and more in the context of, if somebody doesn't have any skills at all, how fast can we get them making some stuff that they think is pretty cool?”
The web-based app is, essentially, a one-button music studio. Users can compose wholly original songs in around 5 to 10 minutes simply by clicking Create Song from the homepage, selecting the desired style of beat — whether that’s rap, lo-fi, experimental or “global grooves” — and then fiddling with the composition and mix until they’re satisfied. That song can then be uploaded to any of 40-plus streaming and social platforms where the song’s author can earn royalties based on the number of times their song is played.
Embedded below is a loopable, meditative jingle I put together during the course of my research. Despite my inherent lack of rhythm and general disinterest in music production, I found this to be a rather relaxing and enjoyable experience. After choosing the underlying beat and waiting a half-minute for the AI to generate a mix, the production process largely involved just shuffling icons around to adjust the composition and fiddling with dropdown menus to the instrument sets until I got something that I liked and think vaguely resembles the Konami menu screen music I grew up with. The entire process took less than 10 minutes.
Unlike recurrent neural network analysis models such as OpenAI or Google’s Magenta which, for example, can analyze Michael Jackson songs to be able to recreate the King of Pop’s signature sound, Boomy is not trained on copyrighted works. This is due in part because of the highly-segmented nature of copyright law, which varies drastically between nations and territories, but also because of the black box nature of such systems. If the infinite monkey theorem is any barometer, there is always a chance (albeit tiny) that a system trained on Michael Jackson might randomly spit out a perfect recreation of “Thriller.” And that’s very bad for the system’s designer.
“If I'm a music publisher and I own the rights to Michael Jackson,” Mitchell said. “I'm going to look at that model I'm gonna say ‘great, you know what, that's all mine’… if you're making a copy of somebody else's work, even if it's transformed, you're probably going to owe some publishing on that.’”
Instead, the team is taking a bottom up approach, leveraging previous experience in A&R research to train its AI in building beats and compositions from scratch. “We have some really advanced algorithms that are doing automatic mixing, deciding what sound should go together — what are the features of those sounds, how do those fit together, what is the perceived loudness rate of those sounds,” Mitchell explained.
Those features grew from a brute-force development approach — putting together various combinations of beats and compositions, then presenting them to beta testers. “In our first iteration of our model had a 98-percent rejection rate, but a 2-percent stay rate,” he continued. “And in that 2 percent, over millions of sessions, we started saying, ‘okay, here are groups of features that go well together.’”
Mitchell doesn’t view Boomy simply as a music creation tool, but as a means to achieve “the ideal world that we want to create," one which would allow creators anywhere on the planet to register themselves as a co-writer of their work alongside Boomy at their local publishing rights organization. However, because copyright law varies from country to country, Boomy has established an alternative way to ensure that songwriters get paid for their creative works.
“So what we're saying here is, a real world example would be, we just built a music studio, we filled it with great equipment, and spent millions of dollars building the studio,” Mitchell told Engadget. “You can come in and use it for free, make whatever you want, and on your way out, we're assigning you to our label, and we're going to give you an 80 percent rev share on everything we collect from what you made in the studio.”
“The IP vests with us,” he continued, noting that Boomy has been used to create more than 3 million songs to date, “which actually makes us, ironically, the largest record label in the world.” For users who are either already established musicians or otherwise want to obtain sole ownership of their songs, ”they can submit a rights request, and we can basically either sell the copyright to them or come to some other arrangement.”
While Mitchell could not share exact figures with Engadget, he did estimate that in the two years since Boomy’s launch, the company has paid out “tens of thousands' ' of dollars in royalties to its user base.
Moving forward, Mitchell foresees Boomy’s UI to add more additional control features and composition inputs, “over the next several months, we're really gonna focus and double down on vocal, melody and top line,” he explained.
The company is also working on new methods to earn royalties for its users. “We’ve got a bunch of influencer groups lined up and we've been doing some stuff behind the scenes to place tracks into YouTube videos,” Mitchell continued. “If you're a creator, or if you've got a podcast, rather than go pay for music rights, why not get paid for the music that you're using?”
Between CEO Elon Musk's often erratic antics, strident competition from existing industry titans, and a public that is still not fully sold on the idea of traveling via electrical charge, Tesla's road to prominence has not been a smooth one. But facing a federal investigation into its driver assist systems, is far from the biggest roadblock the company has navigated. As journalist Tim Higgins explains in his new book, Power Play, back in the early aughts, Tesla's engineering team had to overcome an even tougher challenge: keeping the first iterations of its EVs from randomly exploding.
A panicked letter from LG Chem arrived at Tesla with a dire demand: Return its batteries.
Just as Tesla was proving it could craft a lithium-ion battery pack on its own, the battery industry was grappling with the danger that cells posed when they were handled incorrectly. AC Propulsion had learned this the hard way months earlier, in one of an increasing number of incidents that sent shudders through the battery industry. En route from Los Angeles to Paris, a shipment of AC Propulsion’s batteries caught fire as it was being loaded onto a FedEx airplane while it refueled in Memphis, triggering an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board and prompting concerns about how to transport batteries in the future. Personal electronics companies, such as Apple Inc., were recalling devices with lithium-ion batteries out of concern they could overheat and catch fire. In 2004 and 2005, Apple recalled more than 150,000 laptops — with batteries made by LG Chem.
When LG Chem realized it had sold a large number of its batteries to a Silicon Valley startup that planned to use all of them for a single device — a car, as it happened — its legal department sent a letter demanding the cells be returned. The battery maker didn’t want to be associated with a potentially fiery experiment.
[Tesla's first CEO, Martin] Eberhard ignored the request. He had little choice. His bet that Tesla would be able to find a ready battery supplier was proving harder to cover than expected. Without these batteries, there might not be a second chance to get more.
Amid all of the attention on lithium-ion batteries, [Tesla Co-Founder/CTO, JB] Straubel thought back to his former house in LA, where he and [Tesla employee number 7, Gene] Berdichevsky celebrated the idea of an electric car by setting cells afire. If struck with a hammer, they put on quite a show. Cars were always in danger of that kind of impact, but there was also a more insidious threat. He began to wonder what might happen if one of the cells in the tightly packed cluster that would form a car’s battery pack got too warm.
One day in the summer of 2005, he and Berdichevsky decided to find out. With the office cleared out for the day, they went to the parking lot with a brick of cells — a cluster of batteries glued together. They wrapped one of the cells with a wire that would allow them to heat it remotely. Then, from a safe distance, they flicked the heater on. The individual cell quickly rose to more than 266 degrees Fahrenheit (130 degrees Celsius), causing the battery to flash into a blinding flame as the temperature spiked to 1,472 degrees, then explode altogether, sending the remaining skin of the battery into the sky like a rocket. Then another cell in the pack caught fire, launching into the air. Soon all of the cells were on fire. Bang. Bang. Bang.
Straubel recognized the implications of his amateur pyrotechnics. If an incident like the one he cooked up were to happen in the wild, it could spell the end for Tesla. The next day, after they disclosed their experiment to Eberhard, they showed him the scorched pavement, pitted with holes from the night before. Eberhard urged them to be more careful, but he couldn’t deny that more testing was needed. He gathered the team at his rural house on the hills above Silicon Valley for more experiments. This time, they dug a pit and put a brick of cells in it, then covered it with plexiglass. They heated one of the cells and again the batteries ignited, causing a chain of explosions. Straubel had been right: this wasn’t good. They needed outside help to understand exactly what they were dealing with — the team needed battery experts.
Days later, a small group of battery consultants were gathered with what at first seemed like a manageable message: Yes, even the best battery manufacturers produced a random cell that would have a defect, causing it to short and catch fire. But the odds were remote. “It happens really, really infrequently,” one of the consultants said. “I mean like between one in a million and one in ten million cells.”
But Tesla planned to put about 7,000 cells in a single car. Sitting near Straubel, Berdichevsky pulled out his calculator and computed the likelihood that a cell in one of their cars might catch fire by chance. “Guys, that’s like between one in 150 and one in 1,500 cars,” he said.
And not only would they be churning out cars with defective batteries that, if ignited, could set off a chain reaction, but their cars could be detonating in the garages of the richest of the rich—burning down mansions and lighting up local TV news. The mood in the room shifted. The questions became more urgent: Was there anything that could be done to avoid defective cells?
Nope. Random cells were always going to get too hot and spark thermal runaway — basically an explosion sparked by overheating.
Straubel and the team returned to their work deflated. The stakes couldn’t have been higher for Tesla. This wasn’t just about solving a hard problem, one that threatened to drain limited resources and derail development of the Roadster. If they forged a solution that seemed to work, only to see Tesla vehicles catch fire in years to come, the company would be doomed. And it would be a failure not just for Tesla; their dreams of the electric car could be set back a generation. They could not only cause injury or death, they might kill the electric car in the process.
If they wanted to truly become an automaker, they had to face the challenge that GM, Ford, and others had been dealing with for a hundred years: They had to ensure they were putting safe cars on the roadway. A solution to thermal runaway could amount to a true breakthrough, one that would set Tesla apart from the auto industry for years to come. Using lithium-ion batteries had seemed like a smart idea, one that a number of thinkers had alighted on. But figuring out how to use them without turning the car into a ticking time bomb could be their greatest innovation.
They stopped work on all aspects of the Roadster project and formed a special committee to find a solution. The team set up whiteboards, listing what they knew and what they needed to learn. They began running daily tests. They’d configure a battery pack with the cells spaced differently, to see if there was an ideal distance for containing chain reactions. They tried different methods of keeping the batteries cool, such as having air flow over them or tubes of liquid brush past them. They’d take the packs to a pad used by local firefighters for training and ignite one of the cells to better understand what was taking place.
The danger of the situation was driven home while en route to one of those tests. Lyons, their recruit from IDEO, began to smell smoke coming from the back of his Audi A4, where he had loaded a pack of test batteries. It was a sign that a cell was heating up and approaching thermal runaway. He immediately stopped and yanked the batteries out of the car and threw them to the ground before his car could catch fire — a close call.
Eventually, Straubel began to narrow in on a solution. If they couldn’t keep a cell from warming, maybe they could keep it from reaching the point where it set off a chain reaction. Through trial and error, the team realized that if they had each cell lined up a few millimeters from its neighbor, snaked a tube of liquid between them, and dumped a brownie-batter-like mixture of minerals into the resulting battery pack, they could create a system that contained overheating. If a defective cell within began to overheat, its energy would dissipate to its neighboring cells, with no individual cell ever reaching combustibility.
Where just months earlier they had been struggling to set up a workshop, now they were on to something utterly new. Straubel was thrilled. Now he just needed to figure out how to convince the battery suppliers to trust them. Straubel was hearing from Eberhard that the established manufacturers weren’t interested in their business. As one executive at a supplier told Eberhard: You guys are a shallow pocket. We’re a deep pocket. If your car blows up, we’ll probably get sued.
Deep in the heart of Appalachia, modern science and America's bucolic past meet at a unique crossroad of scientific discovery and luddite lifestyles. The Quiet Zone, by journalist Stephen Kurczy, is the story of a sleepy small town that hosts the Green Bank radio telescope. But the presence of this installation comes at a price: due to the telescope's exceeding sensitivity, virtually every device and appliance that emits radio waves, Wi-Fi signals, or microwave radiation is banned for square miles around. That means that Green Bank, West Virginia has about as much tech today as it did in the 1950's (maybe even a little less) — and some people very much like it that way. But not everybody. In the excerpt below, Pocahontas County attorney, Robert Martin, recounts the challenges of attempting to modernize the region without loosing a horde of gentrifiers upon it as well.
For every electrosensitive who wanted radio quiet, there were probably one hundred residents who wanted WiFi and cell service, and they elected the county’s officials. In early 2018, the Pocahontas County Commission passed a resolution in support of cell service throughout the county, a challenge to the very notion of a Quiet Zone. The commission assigned its attorney, Robert Martin, to contact all major telecommunications providers asking them to invest in Pocahontas.
“I’m doing my level best to get another company in here,” Martin told me in the spring of 2018. He’d invited me to his house to discuss the new cell service ordinance, and we were swigging Bud Lights at his kitchen table.
“How many cell companies have you written to?” I asked.
“All of them,” he said. “I promised the companies that we’ll get everybody in the damn county to sign up with them. I’ll sign up first! . . . I wrote a letter to everybody and said, ‘We have shit for cellphone service here, we want you to come in here, we’ll partner with you, we’ll help you however we can. Come in here.’”
At our feet were two boxers and a basset hound. In the adjacent mudroom was a 250-pound Vietnamese potbellied pig named Pig, who was snoring. Pig knew how to open the front door and pull a blanket over himself. “I’m the true image of West Virginia, aren’t I?” Martin laughed. “I got a pig living in the house.” Despite his home literally being a pigsty, Martin was always the best dressed at county meetings, usually wearing tight designer jeans, leather boots, and a crisp dress shirt, top buttons undone and a few chest hairs curling out. A blustery guy, Martin was once jailed in Marlinton for contempt of court for arguing with a circuit judge. He had a history of getting into fights at West Virginia University football games. For years, he’d also operated a hotel in Belize, paying “tens of thousands of dollars in bribes” and putting the payments on his tax returns so the U.S. government could see the corruption he was dealing with (even if he was admitting to violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act). Martin came across as a dogged lawyer who knew how to get things done. And he wanted cell service.
“You seen that commercial saying Verizon has more coverage than anyone else?” he asked me. “Pause and look at it real closely, and you’ll see right where Pocahontas County is because almost the entire Eastern Seaboard is all yellow [signifying cell coverage] and right there in southeastern West Virginia there’s this hunk about this big—it’s Poca-fucking-hontas County. I swear to God. Right fucking there we are on Verizon’s commercials.”
Martin knew well what connectivity was like outside the Quiet Zone. He had earned his law degree from West Virginia University in 1979, married a girl from Marlinton, and started his career in Pocahontas County before becoming a well-heeled insurance defense lawyer in Charleston. He’d gotten his first cellphone in 1986—it was the size of a beer bottle, with a three-foot-long antenna, and it went to bed with him every night. That attachment ended in 2012 when he moved back to Pocahontas, where he only carried an iPhone so he could listen to music in his truck. I asked if he was concerned about the impact of cell service on the electrosensitives.
“Wackos that are afraid of their brains getting fried and all that?” he responded. “Yeah, I know about them.”
“They see Green Bank as a haven,” I said.
“So? So?” He said he wasn’t going to let the electrosensitives keep Pocahontas “behind the curve” for cell service.
“But I’m here because you’re behind the curve,” I said. “That makes this place unique.”
“You think we want to deal with stone knives and axes for the rest of our existence? You’re like these fucking people who move in here and don’t want it to change, that it? We have people who have moved here in the last five to ten years and they don’t want anything to change. They’ve ‘discovered’ Pocahontas County and now nothing can change. Well, fuck, that ain’t the way of the world. We have limitations because of the observatory, because of our topography, because of our insignificant population. But we need to do what we can as government entities to make things available to people.”
“Of course,” Martin added, the cell service would have to comply with the Quiet Zone.
“We believe in the observatory, we don’t want to fuck with them,” he said. “Right now, as you and I are sitting here bullshitting, they’re up there looking for fucking E.T. And I want to give them every opportunity to do that. But I’ve got emergency services I’ve got to render in this county.”
In addition to trying to bring in cell service, Martin was assisting the county’s emergency services director, Michael O’Brien, to improve communications. The 911 center in Marlinton had difficulty broadcasting any emergency radio communications toward the northern end of the county, where Green Bank was located. O’Brien found a partial solution by installing an internet-controlled radio system just north of Green Bank in the town of Durbin, but it had minimal range and failed altogether when internet or electricity went down. Pocahontas was also one of the only counties in the state unable to adopt a “smart radio system” that integrated radios with smartphones.
On the off chance that someone made an emergency 911 call from one of the county’s few pockets of limited cell service, authorities had an especially hard time pinpointing the person’s location. “We had a dispatcher spend two and a half hours on the phone one night with a lady that was trapped in her car in a creek,” O’Brien told me. “She didn’t know where she was or how she got there. We were just keeping her calm while we sent the department to look in all the areas that had cell service.”
ACCORDING TO DELOIT TE, a 10 percent increase in mobile penetration increases total factor productivity—a key component of economic growth modeling—by 4.2 percentage points over the long run. In Pocahontas, businesspeople like Kenneth “Buster” Varner felt they needed all the help they could get to keep the county’s economy puttering along, which meant bringing in cell service.
I first met Varner in early 2017, while eating breakfast at the counter at Station 2. A heavy, jowly man, he had leaned over and asked, “Do you think the gravy is too salty?” As we shoveled down heaping plates of biscuits and sausage gravy, he told me about his various businesses. Aside from owning Station 2, he operated a half dozen enterprises involved in logging, excavation, towing, septic pumping, and auto repair. He was also a fire chief. I told him that I imagined a lot of headaches trying to manage all those things within the restrictions of the Quiet Zone.
“You have to realize that we never had cellphone service when everybody else had it, so it wasn’t anything to us,” Varner said. “It’d be more convenient, of course, if it was so you could use your cellphones all the time. But it’s a unique place to live where you don’t have them, and we take a little pride in that.” He noted how the observatory provided jobs and shared its resources, such as lending one of its diesel generators to a funeral home during a recent power outage. “That to me means a lot,” Varner said. “And having the largest telescope in the world out your back door, that’s a pretty neat conversation piece.”
“People can get ahold of me the old-fashioned way,” he added. “Call me on the landline or come look for me.”
Spending more time with Varner, however, I realized that he was hardly a Luddite. When we met again months later in his cluttered office, I found it hard to keep his attention. He kept glancing down at his iPhone to check texts and alerts he was receiving over WiFi. When he took a call, I was left to stare at a poster of a busty woman in a red bikini and firefighter helmet. When he finally put down the iPhone, I told him I was confused. Hadn’t he said he took pride in not using a cellphone?
“I thought it was rude to have a smartphone,” Varner said of his “old” perspective, apparently from just a few months earlier. “I do a lot of business on that phone, more than I ever thought in my wildest dreams that I would do.” I asked if he could ever go back to living without one. “Wouldn’t want to. It’s so handy.”
Varner had an AT&T data plan. He used Siri. He wished all his employees and volunteer firefighters could always be connected through smartphones. Instead, because of the Quiet Zone, he’d invested more than $30,000 in a specially approved radio repeater system to allow his workers to communicate via low-band radio. “I don’t want the observatory to close and for people to lose their jobs,” he said, “but it’d be more convenient for everybody.”
Apple, which basked in ubiquitous praise after refusing to cooperate with federal authorities following the 2016 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, is now aggressively walking back its plans to unilaterally scan customers' phones for child porn on behalf of governments following a swift and furious backlash from privacy advocates. Per a Friday afternoon report from Reuters, the tech company clarified that it will only utilize its proposed system to look for images that have already "been flagged by clearinghouses in multiple countries."
An initial threshold of 30 images(!) would have to be discovered before the automated scanning system alerted Apple that an actual human should review the issue, though the company explained that the figure would eventually be reduced in the future. Apple also made assurances that its list of image identifiers is universal and will remain constant regardless of the device it is being applied to, which should have Matt Gaetz extremely worried.
As Apple explained during Friday's media call, the company's technical protection is one that creates an encrypted on-device CSAM hash database derived from at least two or more organizations, each operating under the auspices of separate national governments.
The company, during one of many media-assuaging follow-up meetings this week, declined to comment on whether the negative blowback has had any effect on its position, though it did admit that there was "confusion" surrounding its earlier announcements. Apple did assert that the program was "still in development" and that mulligans like this were a normal part of the production process.
The practice of scanning user accounts for contraband images is old hat for the tech industry, however Apple's scheme to install the monitoring scheme directly on the device hardware itself is an unprecedented move — one that has privacy advocates up in arms. Basically what's to stop governments from demanding that Apple scour its users' devices for other private, political, religious or personal information once this disingenuous "think of the children" precedent is put into effect?
We’ve reached a disquieting point in the COVID-19 pandemic wherein a significant portion of the American public refuses to accept the free and wildly effective vaccines while simultaneously demanding a “return to normalcy” — and all the benefits that reopening the economy would entail. But with the Delta variant’s rapid spread threatening to send the country back into another round of social isolation, state and local governments (and numerous businesses) are seeking to strike a balance between the public’s health and the nation’s economic needs through the use of digital vaccine cards, aka “vaccine passports.” But, unlike the mRNA vaccine itself, these passports are not quite the magic bullets against COVID we had hoped.
Vaccine passports, either physical or digital records certifying that a person has been fully vaccinated against a disease, have been around since the 19th century. As early as the 1880s, students and educators in the US were required to show proof of immunization against smallpox before attending classes. In 1897 Russian scientist Waldemar Haffkine developed a vaccine against the bubonic plague. His breakthrough treatment was immediately put to use by the British colonizers of India. To help ensure that densely populated Hindu and Muslim pilgrimage sites in the country did not mutate into outbreak clusters of the disease, the local government began requiring proof of vaccination by every pilgrim before entering these sites.
With the rise of air travel in the second half of the 20th century, the United Nations adopted similar rules in 1951 and then again in 1969, dubbed the International Health Regulations. These regulations, along with widespread outbreaks of yellow fever, led to the advent of “yellow cards,” which international travellers have carried for decades to certify their immunization against a wide variety of infectious diseases.
Yellow fever is currently the only disease currently on the IHR for which countries can demand vaccination proof as a condition of entering the country, though the UN’s regulations on any disease are advisory and non-binding in nature so the responsibility for adhering to and implementing those rules falls to individual nations.
In response to the COVID pandemic, many nations already have embraced a new generation of vaccine passports. Israel has the Green Pass, Denmark has the Coronapas, the European Union (but not the UK) offers the EU Digital Covid Certificate, China rolled out its vaccine passport as a WeChat mini app in March, and Estonia uses VaccineGuard. Even private businesses are considering implementing their own systems. United, JetBlue and Lufthansa, for example, are rolling out CommonPass, a system designed to verify an international passenger’s COVID testing and vaccination status.
“This is likely to be a new normal need that we’re going to have to deal with to control and contain this pandemic,” Dr. Brad Perkins, chief medical officer at the Commons Project Foundation, the nonprofit that developed CommonPass, told The New York Times in December.
“The federal government is working on this issue of vaccine credentialing or vaccine verification or what some people call vaccine passports. So we’re going to be following carefully what the federal government comes out with,” Tomás Aragón, director of the California Department of Public Health, told the SF Chronicle in April. “If they don’t move fast enough, we will come out with technical standards of what we expect and also really focusing on making sure that that privacy is protected and that equity is protected.”
Instead, Americans are offers a hodgepodge of local and state regulations, at least those states that haven't banned certification systems — looking at you, Arkansas, Texas, Florida, and Indiana — despite clear legal precedent affirming the government’s authority to temporarily abridge certain individual rights during a public health crisis (see: Jacobson v. Massachusetts).
Take California, for example. The Golden State recently rolled out the Digital COVID-19 Vaccine Record, a system that securely pulls the data stored in the California immunization registry. It’s the same state-collected vaccination data that is seen on the paper cards issued when you got your shots — specifically your name, date of birth, vaccination dates, and vaccine manufacturer.
“It’s not a passport. It’s not a requirement. It’s just the ability now to have an electronic version of that paper version,” California Governor Gavin Newsom explained during a press conference announcing the system’s rollout in June.
The system can also store a scannable QR code on your mobile device so that businesses and venues that do require certification of full vaccination prior to entry can do so easily. The QR code is built on the non-profit SMART Health Card technology, which means that only SMART-compatible scanners can actually read the codes. And in San Francisco, that’s literally all of them. This is a built-in security feature ensuring that some random clown at the bar can’t surreptitiously scan your code using the generic QR reader on their phone and get access to your information.
However, the system’s rollout has not been without its hiccups. This reporter specifically has spent the past six weeks attempting to resolve an issue with incomplete vaccination data being reported to the registry. (Basically, it reads that my second dose is the only dose I received.) The CDPH declined to comment on how many Californians have registered for the service and how many of those registrants have run into similar problems, though the agency has set up a virtual agent to help guide users through the process of alerting the state to any mistakes or omissions.
New York, on the other hand, has not one but two competing vaccine verification systems, neither of which has proven particularly reliable, trustworthy or useful. At the state level, you’ve got the Excelsior Pass, which operates in a similar fashion to California’s DCVR system — pulling immunization data directly from the state’s registry — and leverages IBM’s proprietary blockchain technology to maintain data security and user privacy. At the local level, New York City has rolled out a passport app of its own, dubbed the NYC COVID Safe App, which for all intents and purposes is a half-assed image storage app that is ridiculously easy to spoof.
As I explained to @WNYC today, New York City's new #NYCCovidSafe app isn't exactly cutting edge technology. It accepted this portrait of Mickey as proof of vaccination.
We need to get New Yorkers vaccinated, not another City Hall PR stunt.
As you can see from the above tweet, STOP founder and NYC-based privacy advocate Albert Fox Cahn was able to get the NYC app to accept a picture of the iconic rodent in lieu of his actual state-issued vaccination card.
"I uploaded a photo of Mickey Mouse when I registered for it and then it gave me a pop up box saying are you affirming this is accurate," Cahn told WNYC earlier this month. "You click yes. And then you're done."
This feat was easily replicated by other users, including San Francisco-based journalist Cyrus Farivar, who used the menu from a local BBQ joint as his photo.
“The NYC COVID Safe App was designed with privacy at the top of mind, and allows someone to digitally store their CDC card and identification,” Laura Feyer, spokesperson for Mayor Bill de Blasio, told Gothamist in response to these reports. “Someone checking vaccination cards at the door to a restaurant or venue would see that those examples are not proper vaccine cards and act accordingly.”
“The functionality of this app really raises the question, why did the city create it to begin with, because like so many other vaccinated New Yorkers, I had a photo album with my vaccine card months ago,” Cahn told Engadget. “It's unclear how this was anything more than a publicity stunt to roll it out as a new city app.”
“And then on top of that, to then make these broad sweeping statements that how the app is unhackable and to also say that there's no privacy impact when the app is also collecting your IP address and record of every time it's open,” he continued. “It's not a huge amount of IP information but it's information that the city was never collecting before, it's information that they simply don't need.”
What’s more, the NYC COVID Safe app’s lackisadical security also makes it prone to exploitation by anti-vaxxers, like noted area conspiracy theorist, Joe Rogan. Since the app doesn’t independently verify any of the information it is displaying, instead relying on bar, venue and restaurant staffers to make the determination as to whether a photo is legitimate or not, malicious users could easily upload a photo of any vaccine card — whether it’s been photoshopped, acquired from a friend or bought on on the black market (for $400).
The state-run Excelsior Pass has run into privacy issues of its own. For one, its reliance on IBM’s blackbox blockchain system provides virtually no accountability or transparency in how the system actually operates.
The “thing is highly engineered, it has all these layers of registration, verification, and a customized QR code,” Cahn said. “That's raising far more important privacy issues because the state is quite clear that it doesn't use location services. But since each scanner is registered to a specific business address, every time you scan that QR code, the state and IBM are collecting a record of where you were and when, and we haven't done any clear information on how long that data is retained.”
What’s more, an experiment conducted in April by Cahn found that even with the blockchain assurances, the app was remarkably easy to hack. “After getting consent from an Excelsior Pass user, I tried to download their pass, logging into their account using nothing more than public information from social media. Eleven minutes after he gave me the greenlight, I had a copy of his blue Excelsior Pass in hand, valid for use until September,” Cahn wrote for the Daily Beast.
“This city app really just speaks to the dysfunction. Here in New York, the rivalry between the city and state, the fact that we have a mayor and the governor who can't stand each other, and it is not addressing a technical need,” he lamented. “These apps are such a debacle that we just need to go back to old-fashioned paper records.”
The Munich Animal Welfare Association has taken a unique approach to matching its resident adoptable pets with their new forever homes: putting their profiles on popular dating app, Tinder. The shelter hired a local advertising agency to snap professional headshots for 15 cats and dogs, then posted them with astonishing results.
"The response is insane," Jillian Moss of the MAWA told Reuters. "It's exploding everywhere."
The move comes amid concerns from animal welfare groups that the high rates of adoptions seen during the COVID lockdowns are slowing and could reverse as the pandemic ebbs. By putting posting the profiles on Tinder, the shelter can potentially connect these pets with motivated adopters.
Benjamin Beilke, who works on Tinder's communication team, added, "we hope that these animals really find a new partner, a 'purrfect match' in the long term and not just for a few weeks."
Not to be outdone by the Rivian R1T's "tank-turning" feat or the Hummer EV's crab-walking capabilities, Chevrolet on Wednesday shared a sneak peak of its own all-wheel steering trick arriving with the upcoming Silverado EV. This system is designed to reduce the vehicle's turning radius at low speeds and improve handling and control at higher speeds.
Many details about the 2023 Silverado EV remain scarce though we do know that the R1T and F-150 rival will sport GM's Ultium battery technology and share the Hummer EV's electric drivetrain. Depending on the battery pack size, that could translate into a 400 mile range. There's no word yet on pricing, trim levels or specific availability, though the 2023 model is expected to go on sale in early 2024 and, if the EV follows the pricing model for its gas-powered cousins, we could see the electrified Silverado start at around $50,000 — but again, Chevy hasn't officially confirmed those details.
Visual media has come a long way since the first proto-human cave dwellers used the flickering of torch light to bring the hand-drawn art on their walls to life. Today, the pixel — despite its humble, low-resolution origins — sits as the current pinnacle of digital display technology. In his new book, Biography of the Pixel, Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith examines the fascinating history and development of picture elements (hence "pix"-"el") from their often-contested start in the labs of pioneering computer researchers like Alan Turing to their ubiquitous presence in modern life. In the excerpt below, Smith takes a look at the bad old days before digital displays to explain the science behind our brain's' ability to perceive motion through the rapid flashing of static images.
What did the inventors of cinema do (or not) to make the system they gave us so non-ideal? First, they didn’t give us instantaneous samples as required by sampling. Film frames are fat. They have duration. The camera shutter is open for a short exposure time. A moving object moves during that short interval, and so smears slightly across the frame during the film exposure time. It’s like what happens when you try to take a long-exposure still photo of your child throwing a ball and his arm is just a blur. This turns out to be a saving grace of cinema as it was actually practiced.
Second, they made it so each frame is projected twice (at least) by the projector. Ouch! That’s not sampling at all. Why did the inventors do that? Simple economics demanded it: 24 frames per second costs half as much film as 48 frames per second. But the eye needs to be refreshed about 50 times per second, or the retinal image fades between frames. Actually, 48 is close enough to 50 to work in a dark theater. How do you get 48 from 24? You show each frame twice! If you show just 24 frames per second, the screen appears to flicker. Hence the “flicks” from the early days of cinema before higher frame rates were adopted.
The third thing the original inventors did was to shut off the light between projected frames. This meant that 48 times per second, nothing (blackness) was projected into the eye — inside the pupil, onto the retina. It’s convenient for movie machines — both the camera and projector part — to “shutter” to blackness like this between frames. It allows time for the mechanical advancement of the next film frame into position. In a camera, it keeps the film from recording the real world during the physical advancement of the film. In a projector, it keeps the moving film out of eyesight as it’s physically advanced.
When you ask how a movie projector works, some people say something like this: There’s a top reel of film which is the source of film, and a bottom take-up reel. The film moves from reel to reel and passes between the light source of the projector and its lens, which magnifies the frame-size image up to screen size. In other words, the film moves continuously past the light source. But that doesn’t work. The eye sees exactly what’s there, and with this scheme the eye would see one frame sliding away as the next frame slides in from the opposite side. It would see the sliding. And that won’t work.
What a projector actually does is exactly this: It brings each frame into fixed position with the light source blocked. That’s the function of the shutter. Then the shutter opens and the illuminated frame projects onto the screen. Then the shutter closes. Then it opens again, and the illuminated frame is projected a second time onto the screen. Then the shutter closes and the next frame slides into position, and so forth.
We’ve just described the discrete, or intermittent, movement of film through a projector, as opposed to unworkable continuous movement. The same idea holds for a camera. The physical device that implements this action is called, in fact, an intermittent movement. This is the key notion in cinema history that is comparable to the conditional branch instruction in computer history. The mad rush to the movie machine turned on who first got a projector to work correctly, and that hinged on who got an intermittent movement working properly. It’s a defining notion.
To recap: An actual film-based movie projector doesn’t reconstruct a continuous visual flow from the frame samples and present this to the eye. Instead, it sends “fat samples” — thick with time duration and smeared motion — directly to the eye’s retina. It sends each frame twice, and it sends blackness between. It’s up to the brain to reconstruct motion from these inputs. How does that work?
Somehow the eye-brain system “reconstructs the visual flow” that’s represented by the fat visual samples it receives. Of course, it really does no such thing. Light intensities come in through the pupil as input. But the output from the eye to the brain, through the optic nerve, is an electrochemical pulse train. Neuronal pulse trains aren’t visual flows. It could be that the retina actually does reconstruct a visual flow and then converts it to pulse trains for brain consumption. The responses of some of the neurons in the eye certainly suggest the spreader function, complete with a high positive hump and negative lobes. But brain activity is beyond the scope of this book. Let’s concentrate instead on the customary explanations of the perception of motion from sequences of still snapshots.
Perception of Motion
The classic explanation is hoary old persistence of vision. It’s a real characteristic of human vision: once an image stimulus to the retina ceases, we continue to perceive the image there for a short while. But persistence of vision explains only why you don’t see the blackness between frames in the case of film-based movies. If an actor or an animated character moves to a new position between frames then — by persistence of vision — you should see him in both positions: two Humphrey Bogarts, two Buzz Lightyears. In fact, your retinas do see both, one fading out as the other comes in—each frame is projected long enough to ensure this. That’s persistence of vision. But it doesn’t explain why you perceive one moving object, not two objects at different positions. What your brain does with the information from the retinas determines whether you perceive two Bogarts in two different positions or one Bogart moving between them.
Psychophysicists have performed experiments to determine the characteristics of another real brain phenomenon, called apparent motion. The experiments don’t explain how the brain perceives motion, but they do describe the limitations of the phenomenon. A small white dot on a black background is presented to a subject’s retina. Then that dot is removed, and another dot is presented in a different position. The experimenters can vary two things, the spatial separation of the two dots and the time delay between position change. The brain perceives one dot here and another dot there, but only if the distance and delays are long enough. If the distance and delays are short, the brain perceives that the dot moves from one position to the other. It’s apparent motion because no actual motion is presented to the eye. The brain perceives what it doesn’t see.
Motion Blur
Persistence of vision is such that we still perceive the first image when the second one arrives. That sounds a lot like frame spreading. A frame of short duration spreads out in time and adds to the next frame also spread out in time. It’s as if the retina does the image spreading and the adding of successive spread frames. Something like this must be going on because we perceive a continuous visual field although the film projector doesn’t present one. You can think of the shape of the persistence function of the eye as the shape of the frame spreader that’s built into us human perceivers. Another reason we can assume that the eye-brain system must be doing a reconstruction, one that implicitly uses the Sampling Theorem, is because we perceive exactly the errors we would expect if that were the actual mechanism—such as wagon wheels spinning backward.
Classic cel animation — of the old ink-on-celluloid variety — relies on the apparent-motion phenomenon. The old animators knew intuitively how to keep the successive frames of a movement inside its “not too far, not too slow” boundaries. If they needed to exceed those limits, they had tricks to help us perceive the motion. They drew actual speed lines, which showed the brain the direction of motion and implied that it was fast, like a blur. Or they provided a POOF of dust to mark the rapid descent of Wile E. Coyote as he stepped unexpectedly off a mesa in hot pursuit of that truly wily Road Runner. They provided a visual language that the brain could interpret.
Exceed the apparent motion limits — without those animators’ tricks — and the results are ugly. You may have seen old school stop-motion animations — such as Ray Harryhausen’s classic sword-fighting skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) — that are plagued by an unpleasant jerking motion of the characters. You’re seeing double, at least — several edges of a skeleton at the same time — and correctly interpret it as motion, but painfully so. The edges stutter, or “judder,” or “strobe” across the screen. Those words reflect the pain inflicted by staccato motion.
Live-action movies are sequences of discrete frames just like animations. Why don’t these movies stutter? (Imagine directing Uma Thurman to stay within “not too far, not too slow” limits.) There’s a general explanation that works. It’s called motion blur, and it’s simple and pretty. A frame that’s recorded by a real movie camera is fat with duration. It’s not a sample at a single instant like a Road Runner or a Harryhausen frame. Motion blur is what you see in a still photograph when the subject moves and the shutter isn’t fast enough to stop the motion. In still photographs, it’s often an unintended result, but it turns out to be a feature in movies. Without the blur all movies would look as jerky as Harryhausen’s skeletons—unless Uma miraculously stayed within limits. The motion blur of moving objects in a fat frame gives clues to the brain about what is moving and what is not. The direction of a blur gives the direction of motion, and its length indicates the speed. Somehow, mysteriously, the brain converts that spatial information — the blurs — into temporal information and then perceives motion with the help of the apparent motion phenomenon.
The nature of war continues to evolve through the 21st century with conflict zones shifting from jungles and deserts to coastal cities. Not to mention the rapidly increasing commercial availability of cutting-edge technologies including UAVs and wireless communications. To help the Marine Corps best prepare for these increased complexities and challenges, the Department of Defense tasked DARPA with developing a digital training and operations planning tool. The result is the Prototype Resilient Operations Testbed for Expeditionary Urban Scenarios (PROTEUS) system, a real-time strategy simulator for urban-littoral warfare.
When the PROTEUS program first began in 2017, “there was a big push across DARPA under what we call a sustainment focus area, and that included urban warfare,” Dr. Tim Grayson, director of DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, told Engadget, looking at how to best support and “sustain” US fighting forces in various combat situations until they can finish their mission.
DARPA
The PROTEUS program manager (who has since departed DARPA), Dr. John S Paschkewitz, “came to the realization that the urban environment is really complex, both from a maneuver perspective,” Grayson said, “but also going into the future where there's all this commercial technology that will involve communications and spectrum stuff, maybe even robotics and things of that nature.”
Even without the threat of armed UAVs and autonomous killbots, modern urban conflict zones pose a number of challenges including limited lines of sight and dense, pervasive civilian populations. “There's such a wide range of missions that happen in urban environments,” Grayson said. “A lot of it is almost like peacekeeping, stabilization operations. How do we… help the local populace and protect them.” He also notes that the military is often called in to assist with both national emergencies and natural disasters, which pose the same issues albeit without nearly as much shooting.
“So, if someone like the Marines or some other kind of sustainment military unit had to go conduct operations in a complex urban environment,” he continued, “it'd be a limited footprint. So, [Paschkewitz] started looking at what we refer to as the ‘what do I put in the rucksack problem.’”
“The urban fight is about delivering precise effects and adapting faster than the adversary in an uncertain, increasingly complex environment,” Paschkewitz said in a DARPA release from June. “For US forces to maintain a distinct advantage in urban coastal combat scenarios, we need agile, flexible task organizations able to create surprise and exploit advantages by combining effects across operational domains.”
PROTEUS itself is a software program designed to run on a tablet or hardened PDA and allow anyone from a squad leader up to a company commander to monitor and adjust the “composition of battlefield elements — including dismounted forces, vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), manned aircraft and other available assets,” according to the release. “Through PROTEUS, we aim to amplify the initiative and decision-making capabilities of NCOs and junior officers at the platoon and squad level, as well as field-grade officers, commanding expeditionary landing teams, for example, by giving them new tools to compose tailored force packages not just before the mission, but during the mission as it unfolds.”
But PROTEUS isn’t just for monitoring and redeploying forces, it also serves as a real-time strategy training system to help NCOs and officers test and analyze different capabilities and tactics virtually. “One of the beauties of [PROTEUS] is it's flexible enough to program with whatever you want,” Grayson said. It allows warfighters to “go explore their own ideas, their own structure concepts, their own tactics. They're totally free to use it just as an open-ended experimentation, mission rehearsal or even training type of tool.”
But for its design flexibility, the system’s physics engine closely conforms to the real-world behaviors and tolerances of existing military equipment as well as commercial drones, cellular, satellite and Wi-Fi communications, sensors and even weapons systems. “The simulation environment is sophisticated but doesn't let them do things that are not physically realizable,” Grayson explained.
The system also includes a dynamic composition engine called COMPOSER which not only automate the team’s equipment loadout but can also look at a commander’s plan and provide feedback on multiple aspects including “electromagnetic signature risk, assignment of communications assets to specific units and automatic configuration of tactical networks,” according to a DARPA press release.
DARPA
“Without the EMSO and logistics wizards, it’s hard to effectively coordinate and execute multi-domain operations,” Paschkewitz said. “Marines can easily coordinate direct and indirect fires, but coordinating those with spectrum operations while ensuring logistical support without staff is challenging. These tools allow Marines to focus on the art of war, and the automation handles the science of war.”
Currently, the system is set up for standard Red vs Blue fights between opposing human forces though Grayzon does not expect PROTEUS to be upgraded to the point that humans will be able to compete against the CPU and even less likely that we’ll see CPU vs CPU — given our current computational and processing capabilities. He does note that the Constructive Machine-learning Battles with Adversary Tactics (COMBAT) program, which is still underway at DARPA, is working to develop “models of Red Force brigade behaviors that challenge and adapt to Blue Forces in simulation experiments.”
“Building a commander’s insight and judgment is driven by the fact that there’s a live opponent,” Paschkewitz said in June. “We built ULTRA [the sandbox module that serves as the basis for the larger system] around that concept from day one. This is not AI versus AI, or human versus AI, rather there is always a Marine against an ADFOR (adversary force), that’s another Marine, typically, forcing the commander to adapt tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and innovate at mission speed.”
“PROTEUS enables commanders to immerse themselves in a future conflict where they can deploy capabilities against a realistic adversary,” Ryan Reeder, model and simulation director, MCWL Experiment Division, said in a statement. “Commanders can hone their battlefield skills, while also training subordinates on employment techniques, delivering a cohesive unit able to execute in a more effective manner.
Technically, DARPA’s involvement with the PROTEUS program has come to an end following its transfer to the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab where it is now being used for ADFOR training and developing new TTPs and CONOPS. “My guess is they will mostly use it for their own purposes, as opposed to continuing to develop it,” Grayson said. “The Warfighting Lab is less focused on technology and more focused on our future force, concepts and what are our new tactics.”
