Enlarge/ Roku Streambar owners can use their device as a center audio channel in a 3.1 or 5.1 speaker configuration. (credit: Roku)
Today, Roku announced a new streamer in its lineup, the Streaming Stick 4K, alongside a “plus” version of the device with a better remote. The company also confirmed that Roku OS 10.5 will begin rolling out “in the coming weeks,” bringing new audio features and improved search and voice capabilities to compatible Roku devices.
The Roku Mobile app also boasts a few new functions, including a feature to fix audio delays on wireless earbuds paired to Roku streamers. We also have a preview of a new wireless soundbar from TCL and a refresh to the Walmart-exclusive Roku Ultra LT.
Roku OS 10.5 and the Roku Mobile app
Sound is a big theme in Roku’s latest release. The mobile app’s new audio/video sound sync feature is aimed at fixing delays for those using wireless headphones with their Rokus. It works by first attempting to fix sync issues automatically, via a headphone-specific troubleshooter. If the issue persists, users can activate their smartphone camera from within the Roku app to visually assist in syncing audio. A preloaded video will play on-screen as it instructs you to point the phone camera at it to allow the app to attempt to properly sync the audio and video.
Epik has now confirmed that an “unauthorized intrusion” did in fact occur into its systems. The announcement follows last week’s incident of hacktivist collective Anonymous leaking 180 GB of data stolen from online service provider Epik. To mock the company’s initial response to the data breach claims, Anonymous had altered Epik’s official knowledge base, as reported by Ars.
Epik is a domain registrar and web services provider known to serve right-wing clients, some of which have been turned down by more mainstream IT providers due to the objectionable and sometimes illicit content hosted by the clients. Epik’s clients have included the Texas GOP, Parler, Gab, and 8chan, among others.
Epik hack impacts millions of non-customers, too
Turns out, the leaked data dump contains 15,003,961 email addresses belonging to both Epik’s customers and non-customers, and not everyone is pleased with the news. This occurred as Epik had scraped WHOIS records of domains, even those not owned by the company, and stored these records. In doing so, the contact information of those who have never transacted with Epik directly was also retained in Epik’s systems.
Enlarge/ Getting the hang of iteratively building commands interactively is all it really takes to become a command line wizard. (credit: Bashar Shglila / Getty Images)
In our first tutorial on command line wizardry, we covered simple redirection and the basics of sed, awk, and grep. Today, we’re going to introduce the concepts of simple variable substitution and loops—again, with a specific focus on the Bash command line itself, rather than Bash scripting.
If you need to write a script for repeated use—particularly one with significant logical branching and evaluation—I strongly recommend a “real language” instead of Bash. Luckily, there are plenty of options. I’m personally a big fan of Perl, in part because it’s available on pretty much any *nix system you’ll ever encounter. Others might reasonably choose, say, Python or Go instead, and I wouldn’t judge.
The real point is that we’re focusing on the command line itself. Everything below is something you can easily learn to think in and use in real time with a little practice.
Between September 2021 and March 2022, we’re partnering with The Alan Turing Institute to host speakers from the UK, Finland, Germany, and the USA presenting a series of free research seminars about AI and data science education for young people. These rapidly developing technologies have a huge and growing impact on our lives, so it’s important for young people to understand them both from a technical and a societal perspective, and for educators to learn how to best support them to gain this understanding.
In our first seminar we were beyond delighted to hear from Dr Mhairi Aitken, Ethics Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. Mhairi is a sociologist whose research examines social and ethical dimensions of digital innovation, particularly relating to uses of data and AI. You can catch up on her full presentation and the Q&A with her in the video below.
Why we need AI ethics
The increased use of AI in society and industry is bringing some amazing benefits. In healthcare for example, AI can facilitate early diagnosis of life-threatening conditions and provide more accurate surgery through robotics. AI technology is also already being used in housing, financial services, social services, retail, and marketing. Concerns have been raised about the ethical implications of some aspects of these technologies, and Mhairi gave examples of a number of controversies to introduce us to the topic.
“Ethics considers not what we can do but rather what we should do — and what we should not do.”
Mhairi Aitken
One such controversy in England took place during the coronavirus pandemic, when an AI system was used to make decisions about school grades awarded to students. The system’s algorithm drew on grades awarded in previous years to other students of a school to upgrade or downgrade grades given by teachers; this was seen as deeply unfair and raised public consciousness of the real-life impact that AI decision-making systems can have.
An AI system was used in England last year to make decisions about school grades awarded to students — this was seen as deeply unfair.
Another high-profile controversy was caused by biased machine learning-based facial recognition systems and explored in Shalini Kantayya’s documentary Coded Bias. Such facial recognition systems have been shown to be much better at recognising a white male face than a black female one, demonstrating the inequitable impact of the technology.
What should AI be used for?
There is a clear need to consider both the positive and negative impacts of AI in society. Mhairi stressed that using AI effectively and ethically is not just about mitigating negative impacts but also about maximising benefits. She told us that bringing ethics into the discussion means that we start to move on from what AI applications can do to what they should and should not do. To outline how ethics can be applied to AI, Mhairi first outlined four key ethical principles:
Beneficence (do good)
Nonmaleficence (do no harm)
Autonomy
Justice
Mhairi shared a number of concrete questions that ethics raise about new technologies including AI:
How do we ensure the benefits of new technologies are experienced equitably across society?
Do AI systems lead to discriminatory practices and outcomes?
Do new forms of data collection and monitoring threaten individuals’ privacy?
Do new forms of monitoring lead to a Big Brother society?
To what extent are individuals in control of the ways they interact with AI technologies or how these technologies impact their lives?
How can we protect against unjust outcomes, ensuring AI technologies do not exacerbate existing inequalities or reinforce prejudices?
How do we ensure diverse perspectives and interests are reflected in the design, development, and deployment of AI systems?
Who gets to inform AI systems? The kangaroo metaphor
To mitigate negative impacts and maximise benefits of an AI system in practice, it’s crucial to consider the context in which the system is developed and used. Mhairi illustrated this point using the story of an autonomous vehicle, a self-driving car, developed in Sweden in 2017. It had been thoroughly safety-tested in the country, including tests of its ability to recognise wild animals that may cross its path, for example elk and moose. However, when the car was used in Australia, it was not able to recognise kangaroos that hopped into the road! Because the system had not been tested with kangaroos during its development, it did not know what they were. As a result, the self-driving car’s safety and reliability significantly decreased when it was taken out of the context in which it had been developed, jeopardising people and kangaroos.
Mitigating negative impacts and maximising benefits of AI systems requires actively involving the perspectives of groups that may be affected by the system — ‘kangoroos’ in Mhairi’s metaphor.
Mhairi used the kangaroo example as a metaphor to illustrate ethical issues around AI: the creators of an AI system make certain assumptions about what an AI system needs to know and how it needs to operate; these assumptions always reflect the positions, perspectives, and biases of the people and organisations that develop and train the system. Therefore, AI creators need to include metaphorical ‘kangaroos’ in the design and development of an AI system to ensure that their perspectives inform the system. Mhairi highlighted children as an important group of ‘kangaroos’.
AI in children’s lives
AI may have far-reaching consequences in children’s lives, where it’s being used for decision-making around access to resources and support. Mhairi explained the impact that AI systems are already having on young people’s lives through these systems’ deployment in children’s education, in apps that children use, and in children’s lives as consumers.
AI systems are already having an impact on children’s lives.
Children can be taught not only that AI impacts their lives, but also that it can get things wrong and that it reflects human interests and biases. However, Mhairi was keen to emphasise that we need to find out what children know and want to know before we make assumptions about what they should be taught. Moreover, engaging children in discussions about AI is not only about them learning about AI, it’s also about ethical practice: what can people making decisions about AI learn from children by listening to their views and perspectives?
AI research that listens to children
UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, has expressed concerns about the impact of new AI technologies used on children and young people. They have developed the UNICEF Requirements for Child-Centred AI.
UNICEF’s requirements for child-centred AI, as presented by Mhairi. Click to enlarge.
Together with UNICEF, Mhairi and her colleagues working on the Ethics Theme in the Public Policy Programme at The Alan Turing Institute are engaged in new research to pilot UNICEF’s Child-Centred Requirements for AI, and to examine how these impact public sector uses of AI. A key aspect of this research is to hear from children themselves and to develop approaches to engage children to inform future ethical practices relating to AI in the public sector. The researchers hope to find out how we can best engage children and ensure that their voices are at the heart of the discussion about AI and ethics.
We all learned a tremendous amount from Mhairi and her work on this important topic. After her presentation, we had a lively discussion where many of the participants relayed the conversations they had had about AI ethics and shared their own concerns and experiences and many links to resources. The Q&A with Mhairi is included in the video recording.
What we love about our research seminars is that everyone attending can share their thoughts, and as a result we learn so much from attendees as well as from our speakers!
It’s impossible to cover more than a tiny fraction of the seminar here, so I do urge you to take the time to watch the seminar recording. You can also catch up on our previous seminars through our blogs and videos.
Join our next seminar
We have six more seminars in our free series on AI, machine learning, and data science education, taking place every first Tuesday of the month. At our next seminar on Tuesday 5 October at 17:00–18:30 BST / 12:00–13:30 EDT / 9:00–10:30 PDT / 18:00–19:30 CEST, we will welcome Professor Carsten Schulte, Yannik Fleischer, and Lukas Höper from the University of Paderborn, Germany, who will be presenting on the topic of teaching AI and machine learning (ML) from a data-centric perspective (find out more here). Their talk will raise the questions of whether and how AI and ML should be taught differently from other themes in the computer science curriculum at school.
Sign up now and we’ll send you the link to join on the day of the seminar — don’t forget to put the date in your diary.
Akihabara News (Tokyo) — Sony Marketing has announced that it has started accepting orders for its first drone model, Airpeak S1, and its accessory products, with the first shipments expected to go out at the end of October.
Accessories include Airpeak Plus, a cloud service that supports operational efficiency and safe flights, and the Airpeak Protect Plan, a post-purchase replacement service in the event of an accident.
The Airpeak S1 is equipped with Sony’s proprietary motor, propeller, control system, and sensing technology. It can be equipped with a Sony Alpha series mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera.
The Airpeak S1 can fly at speeds of up to 90 kilometers per hour, and on a single battery charge has a flight time of 12-22 minutes, depending on the weight of the payload.
The price for a single Airpeak S1 is about ¥1.1 million (US$10,000) and the dealers are Kyoto-based WorldLink & Company and Nagasaki-based KMT.
Sony announced its intention to enter the drone market in November 2020, explaining, “Airpeak will support the creativity of video creators to the fullest extent possible, aiming to contribute to the further development of the entertainment industry as well as to improved efficiency and savings in various industries. Airpeak will also promote this project to enable drone use with the highest level of safety and reliability in the environments where this has been difficult in the past.”
Akihabara News (Tokyo) — Answering questions before the prefectural assembly, officials of Nagasaki Prefecture revealed the scale of the economic impact expected with the selection of the Casinos Austria-led Integrated Resort (IR) consortium.
According to their estimates, building the IR will lead to an annual visitation of about 8.4 million people to the facility adjoining the Huis Ten Bosch theme park in Sasebo. This is expected to create new jobs for about 30,000 people and have an economic spillover effect to the local region of about ¥320 billion (US$2.9 billion) on an annual basis.
The investment required to build the casino resort is estimated to be about ¥350 billion (US$3.2 billion).
Separately, Casinos Austria International Japan President Akio Hayashi met last week with Takuya Kaneko, chairman of the Sasebo Chamber of Commerce & Industry, to discuss avenues for mutual cooperation.
Hayashi indicated that his company would try to partner with companies in Nagasaki as much as possible during both the construction phase and during operation of the IR.
Kaneko responded, “Given the scale of the IR, the prefecture alone is not sufficient. I want to aim for an all-Kyushu support system. I want related companies to set up sales offices in our area and take root here.”
While Casinos Austria has been selected by Nagasaki Prefecture as its IR consortium partner, there is still one major hurdle left to cross before the project is greenlighted. By next April, the prefecture and the consortium must make a joint application to the central government for licensing.
The government is expected to announce licensing results in mid-2022.
California is famous for its beach weather, but it’s also growing increasingly infamous for its “fire weather,” which is when high temperatures, strong winds, and low humidity combine to prime the landscape to burn. It’s no accident that you’ve been hearing somuchaboutwildfires in recent years: Thanks to climate change, fire weather is on the rise, a new analysis shows.
“It’s not just that it’s hot. It’s not just that it’s dry. It’s that all these conditions are happening at the same time,” says Kaitlyn Weber, a data analyst at Climate Central, a nonprofit news group that published the analysis. “There’s very clearly an increase in these fire weather days that’s been happening since the early 1970s across most of the western United States.”
Weber analyzed data from 225 weather stations from 17 western states going back to 1973, looking at temperature, humidity, and wind speeds, the three main variables that drive catastrophic fires. High temperatures and low humidity suck the moisture out of vegetation to create dry fuels, so one spark easily ignites a wildfire, which swift winds can then push across a landscape with incredible speed. The Camp Fire of 2018, for instance, moved so quickly that it overwhelmed the city of Paradise, killing 86 people, many in their cars trying to get out of town.
Enlarge/ An anti-government graffiti that reads in Farsi “Death to the dictator” is sprayed at a wall north of Tehran on September 30, 2009. (credit: Getty Images)
Nahoft, which means “hidden” in Farsi, is an encryption tool that turns up to 1,000 characters of Farsi text into a jumble of random words. You can send this mélange to a friend over any communication platform—Telegram, WhatsApp, Google Chat, etc.—and then they run it through Nahoft on their device to decipher what you’ve said.
Released last week on Google Play by United for Iran, a San Francisco–based human rights and civil liberties group, Nahoft is designed to address multiple aspects of Iran’s Internet crackdown. In addition to generating coded messages, the app can also encrypt communications and embed them imperceptibly in image files, a technique known as steganography. Recipients then use Nahoft to inspect the image file on their end and extract the hidden message.
Being a global company has its perks. There’s a lot of money to be made overseas. But the biggest US tech companies are finding out that there’s also a downside: Every country where you make money is a country that could try to regulate you.
It’s hard to keep track of all the tech-related antitrust action happening around the world, in part because it doesn’t always seem to be worth paying close attention to. In Europe, which has long been home to the world’s most aggressive regulators, Google alone was hit with a $2.7 billion fine in 2017, a $5 billion fine in 2018, and a $1.7 billion fine in 2019. These sums would be devastating for most companies, but they are little more than rounding errors for a corporation that reported $61.9 billion in revenue last quarter.
Increasingly, however, foreign countries are going beyond slap-on-the-wrist fines. Instead, they’re forcing tech companies to change how they do business. In February, Australia passed a law giving news publishers the right to negotiate payments from dominant internet platforms—effectively, Facebook and Google. In August, South Korea became the first country to pass a law forcing Apple and Google to open their mobile app stores to alternate payment systems, threatening their grip on the 30 percent commission they charge developers. And in a case with potentially huge ramifications, Google will soon have to respond to the Turkish competition authority’s demand to stop favoring its own properties in local search results.
Akihabara News (Tokyo) — In the twenty-fifth episode of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Tanjiro completes his training, while Inosuke and Zenitsu try to catch up after missing several sessions.
The episode begins with Tanjiro requesting the Kocho triplets to help keep him in check and gives them permission to hit him if he ever falters his Total Concentration Breathing.
Tanjiro continues his training with full intensity and he finally manages to catch Tsuyuri during the game of tag. which is testament to his intense training.
For a while longer, Inosuke and Zenitsu continue to bail on their training. Shinobu Kocho comes in and tells them that she believes in them and that they should join Tanjiro in his training. She manages to convince them.
Kanao Tsuyuri’s back story is explored. Her parents had sold her to a random man for money and she started feeling numb, so that she would not feel pain. As he takes her home, Shinobu and her older sister take notice of her and purchase her from the man.
Tsuyuri stays silent as the sisters bathe and take her under their care. Shinobu gets frustrated that Tsuyuri is unable to make her own decisions, she even has to be told to eat or else she does not. She thinks the girl is useless. Her sister remains patient. She gives Tsuyuri a coin that she was told to flip every time she faces a decision.
The boys receive their new blades forged by Hotaru Haganezuka. He blames them for breaking their Nichirin Blades and tries to attack them. Inosuke starts smashing his own blades with a rock to give them the ridges like his old sword, and Haganezuka nearly kills him for it.
Tanjiro gets progressively stronger from his training, while Inosuke and Zenitsu rush to catch up.
Shinobu deems Tanjiro fit to graduate from his training during a check up. During the check up Tanjiro inquires about flame breathing, and she says that she has only ever heard of flame breathing from Rengoku the Flame Hashira.
However, Rengoku is away on a mission and Shinobu tells Tanjiro to wait until he gets back to ask him about it.
Tanjiro continues having one-sided conversations with Nezuko as she sleeps. He vows to save her and kill all the demons.
The episode ends with a scene from a train where a large demon is consuming people. It is the mission Rengoku the Flame Hashira was assigned to.
Akihabara News (Tokyo) — The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) have agreed to work with Russia’s largest independent natural gas producer, PAO Novatek, on developing low-carbon energy projects.
The agreement was announced during the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on September 2.
The pact specifically outlines collaboration on initiatives concerning blue ammonia, hydrogen, and carbon capture, utilization, and storage.
According to Novatek, the parties will “mutually support projects in producing and marketing of ammonia and hydrogen, as well as implementing technologies for carbon capture and storage in Russia and Japan.”
Novatek CEO Leonid Mikhelson commented, “One of the most important elements of our strategy is to reduce our carbon footprint.”
Novatek plans to do so through increasing gas sales as a “part of the future energy mix” as opposed to a “transition fuel.”
The collaboration will facilitate opportunities for Novatek to market clean fuel products to Japanese consumers with the aim of reducing total carbon emissions, as well as to attract investments from Japanese companies and financial institutions.
In July 2020, Japan received a shipment of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Novatek under a spot contract, part of its Yamal LNG project. The recent collaboration secures future ventures in LNG and other low-carbon initiatives.
Valve announced this week that its prestigious Dota 2 tournament The International will require all attendees to be fully masked and vaccinated for entry.
As noted on the Dota 2 site, anyone attending the October competition at the National Arena in Bucharest, Romania, must be at least 10 days out from their final vaccination, and attendees will need to present proof of inoculation (which must be in either English or Romanian) along with a photo ID to gain access to the event grounds and tournament arena. All attendees must also wear a mask and proof-of-vaccination wristband along with their registration badges. Additional safety protocols will be put into place throughout the tournament.
Now in its tenth year, The International gathers together the best Dota 2 teams from around the globe to compete for a multi-million dollar prize pool. But over the past year, Valve has not had an easy time with COVID-related restrictions for its annual tournament. The company’s initial plans to hold The International 10 in Stockholm were scrapped earlier this summer after the Swedish Sports Federation decided not to include esports in its officially recognized body—a move that meant anyone traveling for the tournament would be denied an entry visa.
Enlarge/ Vials with COVID-19 Vaccine labels showing logos of pharmaceutical company Pfizer and German biotechnology company BioNTech. (credit: Getty | Photonews)
A committee of independent advisors for the Food and Drug Administration has voted unanimously (18 to 0) in favor of authorizing a booster dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for people aged 65 and older, as well as people at high risk based on an underlying medical condition and/or occupational exposure (e.g., healthcare workers). The booster doses are recommended to be given at least six months after completion of the primary two doses.
If the FDA moves forward with the advisory committee’s recommendation—which it likely will—boosters will be offered to those two groups based on an Emergency Use Authorization.
Prior to voting in favor of authorization for the two groups, the committee rejected the idea of approving boosters for all people ages 16 and up with a resounding vote of 16 to 2 against.
Enlarge/ Screenshot from the Starlink order page, with the street address blotted out. (credit: SpaceX Starlink)
SpaceX’s Starlink satellite-broadband service will emerge from beta in October, CEO Elon Musk said last night. Musk provided the answer of “next month” in response to a Twitter user who asked when Starlink will come out of beta.
SpaceX began sending email invitations to Starlink’s public beta in October 2020. The service is far from perfect, as trees can disrupt the line-of-sight connections to satellites and the satellite dishes go into “thermal shutdown” in hot areas. But for people in areas where wired ISPs have never deployed cable or fiber, Starlink is still a promising alternative, and service should improve as SpaceX launches more satellites and refines its software.
SpaceX has said it is serving over 100,000 Starlink users in a dozen countries from more than 1,700 satellites. The company has been taking preorders for post-beta service and said in May that “over half a million people have placed an order or put down a deposit for Starlink.”
Enlarge/ Hubble Space Telescope mosaic image of the Crab Nebula, a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star’s supernova explosion in 1054 CE (credit: NASA/ESA/J. Hester & A. Loll (Arizona State University)
In August 1181, astronomers in China and Japan witnessed a bright “guest star” in the night sky that we now know to have been a supernova—one of just a handful of recorded supernovae in our Milky Way that were visible to the naked eye. It shone brightly for a full six months before it disappeared. Astronomers haven’t been able to identify the remnant of the source for SN 1181 for centuries, and that detail is crucial to determine which class the supernova belongs to. Now, an international team of astronomers think they have pinpointed that source as one of the hottest stars in the galaxy within the Pa30 nebula, according to a new paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
As we’ve written previously, there are two types of known supernova, depending on the mass of the original star. An iron-core collapse supernova occurs with massive stars (greater than ten solar masses), which collapse so violently that it causes a huge, catastrophic explosion. The temperatures and pressures become so high that the carbon in the star’s core begins to fuse. This halts the core’s collapse, at least temporarily, and this process continues, over and over, with progressively heavier atomic nuclei. When the fuel finally runs out entirely, the (by then) iron core collapses into a black hole or a neutron star.
Then there is a thermonuclear supernova. Smaller stars (up to about eight solar masses) gradually cool to become dense cores of ash known as white dwarfs. If a white dwarf that has run out of nuclear fuel is part of a binary system, it can siphon off matter from its partner, adding to its mass until its core reaches high enough temperatures for carbon fusion to occur.
The new phones include the iPhone 13, iPhone 13 mini, iPhone 13 Pro, and iPhone 13 Pro Max. Prices range from $699 all the way up to $1,599, with storage configurations ranging from 128GB to 1TB across the line.
The originally stated ship date for these phones was September 24, but unsurprisingly, the dates have slipped back, depending on which phone you’re trying to buy.
Enlarge/ SpaceX’s Booster 4 is lifted onto its orbital launch mount in South Texas. (credit: Elon Musk/Twitter)
The Federal Aviation Administration released a draft environmental review of SpaceX’s plans for orbital launches from South Texas on Friday, kicking off a 30-day public comment period.
The long-awaited procedural step is the first of several regulatory hurdles that SpaceX must clear before obtaining final permission to launch its Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage from a site near Boca Chica, Texas. Such a launch likely remains months away, but it now appears that the feds will ultimately greenlight South Texas for orbital launches. That seemed far from assured before today.
The document, formally called a Draft Programmatic Environmental Assessment, evaluates the potential environmental impacts of SpaceX’s Starship program, including launch and reentry. It also reviews debris recovery, the integration tower and other launch-related construction, and local road closures between Brownsville and Boca Chica beach.
Do cars like the VW ID.4 spell the end of the gas station? [credit:
Jonathan Gitlin ]
CHATTANOOGA, TENN.—Volkswagen in 2021 seems like a rather different company than Volkswagen circa 2015. The company has transformed itself in the wake of dieselgate, and it’s found forgiveness in the arms of American consumers as evidenced by skyrocketing SUV sales. VW has also thrown itself wholeheartedly into electrification, applying the approach of a highly modular platform that can be used to build a range of battery electric vehicles including hatchbacks considered too small for the US and that electric bus everyone loves so much.
In North America, the ID.4 is the tip of the electric spear, an electric crossover that’s pitched perfectly at our automotive mode du jour. We’ve already driven the ID.4 a couple of times: briefly as a pre-production prototype, then for a couple of days on home turf. It wasn’t particularly flashy, and there were a couple of things that needed tweaking. Yet, overall, we were impressed. (And we weren’t alone.)
At launch, the ID.4 was only available in a single configuration: an 82 kWh (gross, 77 kWh useable) lithium-ion battery powering a 201 hp (150 kW), 229 lb-ft (310 Nm) permanent magnet synchronous electric motor at the rear axle. But American car buyers like power, and they love all-wheel drive (for potentially misguided reasons about traction and grip, but that’s neither here nor there).
Enlarge/ A sculpture of Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny in front of the Brandenburg Gate at an anti-Putin demonstration on May 9, 2021 in Berlin, Germany. (credit: Getty Images | Adam Berry )
Apple and Google gave a boost to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ruling party by removing a strategic voting app developed by activists who support the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The app, called “Navalny,” was kicked off the mobile app stores ahead of this weekend’s legislative election as Apple and Google caved to pressure from the Russian government.
“Removing the Navalny app from stores is a shameful act of political censorship. Russia’s authoritarian government and propaganda will be thrilled,” Ivan Zhdanov, who is director of the Navalny-founded Anti-Corruption Foundation and a politician in the Russia of the Future opposition party, wrote on Twitter. While candidates associated with Navalny are banned from the election, the Navalny app was designed to help voters coalesce around opposition candidates who are on the ballot.
As noted by NBC News, the now-removed “tactical voting app allows voters who do not want President [Vladimir] Putin’s ruling political party, United Russia, to win the election to organize around a single opposition candidate in each of the 225 electoral districts in an effort to boost the number of non-Kremlin-approved politicians in power.” Since mid-August, the Russian government has “threatened Apple and Google with fines if they didn’t remove Navalny’s tactical voting app from the App Store and Google Play store,” NBC News wrote.
Enlarge/ Sir Clive Sinclair holding the world’s smallest television screen when it was created by Sinclair Radionics in 1977. (credit: Getty Images)
Sir Clive Sinclair, the namesake of a British electronics manufacturer who helped pioneer Europe’s microcomputing boom, is dead at the age of 81.
His company, Sinclair Radionics, is arguably best known around the world for 1982’s ZX Spectrum, an early example of a computer capable of multi-color, real-time graphics. The device dominated the UK and other European territories in the early 1980s. This computer was a major processing step up from black-and-white Spectrum computers like ZX80 and ZX81, and it debuted in a configuration priced as low as £125. American readers probably best know this platform thanks to popular and ambitious ZX Spectrum games from the little developer Ultimate: Play The Game. That company eventually rebranded itself as Rareware and turned into a ’90s powerhouse on Nintendo consoles.
Yet before his name became interminably linked to gaming history, Sinclair’s rise to running his own electronics manufacturing company largely resembles the stories of American electronics pioneers who began as garage hobbyists. A BBC documentary, Clive Sinclair: The Pace Setters, chronicles the inventor’s rise, which began with him selling one-at-a-time radio kits via mail order in the 1960s.
