Earlier this year, the U.S. government tried to force Facebook to secretly recode its Messenger app to allow the feds to listen into an encrypted, real-time voice call on suspected members associated with the notorious MS-13 gang.

It was only when reporters revealed that when Facebook declined, the feds pushed the court to hold the company in contempt. The case collapsed, but details of the case remain under seal and out of the public eye.

Now, the ACLU wants to know how the feds tried to pull it off.

The rights and civil liberties group filed a motion in California on Wednesday to ask the judge to unseal the case to reveal exactly what the government asked that was enough to convince the court to demand Facebook dismantle Messenger’s encryption in the first place. The motion also wants to know what legal grounds the Justice Department had to compel Facebook to undermine the security in its own product — and for what reason the court pushed back.

Jennifer Granick, the ACLU’s surveillance and cybersecurity counsel, said the public “deserves to know why the government thought it could dismantle measures that protect their right to privacy online.”

“The outcome of this legal dispute between Facebook and the Justice Department has the potential to affect the private communications of millions of Americans who use communication services such as Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, and Microsoft Outlook,” she said.

It’s the latest in several attempts in recent years to compel a company to rework its products to help the government conduct surveillance. But because Facebook won its legal challenge in private, experts warn that other companies facing similar efforts to undermine their products will not be able to use Facebook’s legal precedent in their own defense.

“In a world constantly changing due to rapid advances in technology, the American legal system must keep pace,” said Kara Brandeisky and Kristin Mulvey, two law students at New York University’s School of Law, who helped write the motion. “That can’t happen if we don’t even know what the law says about our right to privacy and security.”

The ACLU’s motion was joined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford’s Riana Pfefferkorn.

Facebook declined to comment. A spokesperson for the Justice Department also declined to comment.

Source: Tech Crunch

Amazon today announced AWS DeepRacer, a fully autonomous 1/18th scale race car that aims to help developers learn machine learning. Priced at $399 but currently offered for $249, the race car lets developers to get hands-on – literally – with a machine learning technique called reinforcement learning (RL).

RL takes a different approach to training models than other machine learning techniques, Amazon explained.

It’s a type of machine learning that works when an “agent” is allowed to act on a trial-and-error basis within an interactive environment. It does so using feedback from those actions to learn over time in order to reach a predetermined goal or to maximize some type of score or reward.

This makes it different from other machine learning techniques – like Supervised Learning, for example – as it doesn’t require any labeled training data to get started, and it can make short-term decisions while optimizing for a long-term goal.

The new race car lets developers experiment with RL by learning through autonomous driving.

Developers first get started using a virtual car and tracks in a cloud-based 3D racing simulator, powered by AWS RoboMaker. Here, they can train an autonomous driving model against a collection of predefined race tracks included with the simulator, then evaluate them virtually or choose to download them to the real-world AWS DeepRacer car.

They can also opt to participate in the first AWS DeepRacer League at the re:Invent conference, where the car was announced. This event will take place over the next 24 hours in the AWS DeepRacer workshops and at the MGM Speedway and will involve using Amazon SageMaker, AWS RoboMaker, and other AWS services.

There are 6 main tracks each with a pit area, a hacker garage, and two extra tracks developers can use for training and experimentation. There will also be a DJ.

The League will continue after the event as well, with a series of live racing events starting in 2019 at AWS Global Summits worldwide. Virtual tournaments will also be hosted throughout the year, Amazon said, with the goal of winning the AWS DeepRacer 2019 Championship Cup at re:invent 2019.

As for the car’s hardware itself, it’s a 1/18th scale, radio-controlled, four-wheel drive vehicle powered by an Intel Atom processor. The processor runs Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, ROS (Robot Operating System), and the Intel OpenVino computer vision toolkit.

The car also includes a 4 megapixel camera with 1080p resolution, 802.11ac WiFi, multiple USB ports, and battery power that will last for about 2 hours.

It’s available for sale on Amazon here.

Source: Tech Crunch

Bird announced today that it will sell its electric scooters to entrepreneurs and small business owners, who can then rent them out as part of a new service called Bird Platform.

The company will provide the independent operators with scooters, which they are given free rein to brand as they please, as well as access to the company’s marketplace of chargers and mechanics, in exchange for 20 percent of the cost of each ride. Bird says fleet managers, which may be independent entrepreneurs or local mom and pop bike rental shops, for example, can also collect and charge the scooters themselves.

There’s no minimum or maximum number of scooters independent operators can purchase, though they have to keep in mind local regulations that, in certain cities, limit the number of scooters permitted on the streets. Bird says the company will initially begin rolling out Bird Platform in December, targeting markets where scooters are already actively used and where regulations are a bit more relaxed. Bird Platform will be irrelevant in San Francisco, for example, where the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has put a cap on the number of e-scooters available and has refused to grant Bird a permit to operate at all.

The company hopes Bird Platform will be a helpful tool as it continues to work its way into new markets around the world.

Bird chief executive officer Travis VanderZanden said they’ve been quietly working on this product for a while and have 300 interested parties waiting to get started with the service.

“In the last year of operating, we kept getting these inbound requests from entrepreneurs that really wanted to take Bird to their cities,” VanderZanden told TechCrunch. “I think there’s been a lot of people passionate about the electric scooter movement and taking cars off the road. There are a lot of entrepreneurs who want to bring Bird to their city.”

Goat, a scooter startup located in Austin, similarly began renting its scooters to micro mobility enthusiasts in the Texas capital. Goat CEO Michael Schramm explained the launch in a company announcement at the time, according to Mashable: “The way we look at it is, why would someone want to be a charger and make $5 a scooter, when they can manage their own fleet and keep all the earnings doing the same task they’re already doing?”

Bird, valued at $2 billion, has raised $415 million in venture capital funding from Greycroft, Sequoia, Accel and others. Since launching about a year ago, it’s clocked in more than 10 million rides and expanded to some 100 cities.

Source: Tech Crunch

Seattle-based launch coordinator Spaceflight is gearing up for its biggest operation yet: Smallsat Express, deploying a staggering 64 separate satellites from 34 different clients — all from a single Falcon 9 rocket. It’s quite an endeavor, but the company believes that this kind of jam-packed “space bus” is the best way to make satellite deployment cheap and easy — relatively speaking, anyway.

Spaceflight, started in 2011, has under its belt plenty of launches from a variety of providers. But demand has been so intense that after taking up a handful of slots on this or that rocket, they finally decided to take the next logical step: “Why not buy our own Falcon?”

That’s how founder Curt Blake explained it to me when I visited the company’s modest office in Westlake, a mile or so from downtown Seattle. Unfortunately, he said, they happened to make that investment just before another SpaceX rocket exploded on the launch pad. That rattled everyone, but ultimately the cost-benefit equation for wholesale rideshare like this makes too much sense.

“There have been lots of shared launches before, but not on this scale,” he said. Dozens deployed, but not 64. The number was actually even higher originally, but some clients had to back out relatively late in the game. That’s one of the downsides of a major shared launch: an inflexible timeline. If 9 out of 10 of the passengers are ready to go, they can’t sit and wait while the last one gets their ducks in a row; the next favorable launch time might be months off.

Spaceflight, like other launch coordinators, does a bunch of things for their clients: help navigate the red tape and schedule things, of course — but perhaps most importantly for a launch of this scale, it works with everyone to create a payload that can launch scores of satellites ranging in size from breadbox to cooler.

That payload, Blake said, is known at SpaceX as the “FrankenStack.” A “stack” is the components in the rocket’s payload that actually do stuff, and Spaceflight had to make this one from scratch. They learned a lot, Blake noted, and had to invent a lot in order to cram all those satellites in there.

The FrankenStack is rather like a giant wedding cake, with layers of different satellite deployment hardware. After all, these satellites are all going to different places, different orbits, different directions. You can’t just get up there and hit the “release” button.

At the very bottom, or rather above the cone that attaches to the rocket stage, is the MPC, or multi-payload carrier, which has a variety of large items on four shelves, including ones that need to be launched along the FrankenStack’s path, as opposed to perpendicular. Above that is the hub and cubesat portion, also called the upper free flier, because it will detach from the MPC and go its own way.

If all goes well, there will be 64 more little stars in the sky by the end of tomorrow. Watch the live stream of the launch on SpaceX’s site starting at about 10 AM.

Source: Tech Crunch