Potentially bad news for those of us who would rather not be assimilated into the Google hive mind: Mozilla seems to be on the rocks. In the wake of revenue problems, the maker of Firefox and other popular tools will close 250 employees, about a quarter of its workforce, and its Taipei office. CEO Mitchell Baker specifically mentioned that “development tools, internal tooling, and platform feature development” in the Firefox team see less investment. As many companies do these days, he managed to blame COVID-19 for the company’s misery. That seems to us a bit definite, but what is the reason for the decline in revenue, here is to hope that Mozilla can keep Firefox alive.
Speaking of our evil lords, it seems like another one of those “options” moment for Google when it “accidentally” enabled some of its smart speakers to listen to domestic events without waking up. In this case, a user reported getting a text about a smoke alarm going off in their home. The alarm was not a surprise because the user was cooking at the time, but the notification was because they did not opt for that particular service. Google’s response was that adding an update to the speaker enabled that feature, a situation they say has since improved. To be clear, this is an interesting feature and one of the more compelling cases we have seen for a smart speaker, but it’s something we’ll definitely want to unregister before it’s activated. Yeah Al that sounds pretty crap to me, Looks like BT aint for me either.
We’ve probably all had the experience over the last few months of being in public when the urge to cough. Masked or not, you struggle to fight the throat back so that someone does not hear your sternutation and thinks you are infected. But now it’s possible for a computer to cough-shame you, thanks to a deep learning cough locator. The model was trained against recordings of people coughing and is linked to an acoustic camera, which identifies the link with a border box and a contour image of the cough that looks like a virtual cloud of microbes all over the world . It’s really interesting technology, sort of the public health version of ShotSpotter, but we doubt it’s going to be very practical in public; if you want to find someone who’s just coughing, someone like this will probably already be involved.
Modern jetfighter technology is advancing rapidly, so much so that the forces they can exert during extreme maneuvers can quickly be deadly to pilots. Given that humans are unlikely to evolve the chance to turn resistance into a puddle of goo under high g-forces, fighters of the future are likely to pick up AI of some sort. To address that possibility, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is running some AI fighter contests this week that look really interesting. Called Alpha Dogfight Trials, the challenge begins with simulated dogfights between AI systems. The winner of those rounds will advance to the final race against a human pilot, who will be streamed live with commentary and coverage on multiple screens. You have to register to get in on the action, and time is limited.
And lastly, let these three words roll in your head for a minute: robotic chameleon tongue. It’s actually not as disturbing as it sounds, because the “Snatcher” in his heart is actually just a frozen tape measure. Designed for distance retrieval, the Snatcher can shoot the steel proboscis of nearly one meter in just 600 milliseconds. The designers see that it is used for drones, but we could potentially deploy it on satellites as well. It should not be too difficult to build something like this at home.
