ReHacked #157: Mozilla releases local machine translation tools as part of Project Bergamot, Turkish Magician Built A $600 MM Nasdaq-Listed Scam, Norway to Track All Supermarket Purchases and more
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Mozilla releases local machine translation tools as part of Project Bergamot #software #privacy
In January of 2019, Mozilla joined the University of Edinburgh, Charles University, University of Sheffield and University of Tartu as part of a project funded by the European Union called Project Bergamot. The ultimate goal of this consortium was to build a set of neural machine translation tools that would enable Mozilla to develop a website translation add-on that operates locally, i.e. the engines, language models and in-page translation algorithms would need to reside and be executed entirely in the user’s computer, so none of the data would be sent to the cloud, making it entirely private.
Last week, Enochian Biosciences’ co-founder, “scientific founder”, “inventor”, and largest shareholder, Serhat Gumrukcu, was arrested by Federal authorities over allegations that he conspired in a plot to murder a Vermont father of six.
The victim, Gregory Davis, was murdered on January 6th, 2018, just 19 days before Gumrukcu was scheduled to appear in court to defend himself against felony fraud allegations related to a 2016 deal with Davis. Federal prosecutors argued that the prospective merger deal that eventually resulted in Enochian going public served as a key motive for the murder.
Enochian is a biotech company with an entirely preclinical pipeline of claimed miracle cures, vaccines and treatments for HIV, Influenza, Hepatitis, Cancer, and COVID-19. The company claimed last week that Gumrukcu “has had no formal role in the Company” and that the incident was “completely unrelated to the Company”.
Ford EVs will be online only with a nonnegotiable price #economy #futurism
Ford CEO Jim Farley said Wednesday that consumers should plan to see dramatic changes as companies compete amid the shift to electric vehicles.
"We've got to go to nonnegotiated price. – We've got to go to 100% online. There's no inventory (at dealerships), it goes directly to the customer. And 100% remote pick up and delivery," he said in New York during Bernstein's 38th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference streamed live.
"Then we have this opportunity to use our physical presence to outperform" competitors, Farley said. "I think our dealers can do it. But the standards are going to be brutal. They're going to be very different than they are today."
VSCodium - Open Source Binaries of VSCode #software #copyrights
When we [Microsoft] build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license.
When you clone and build from the vscode repo, none of these endpoints are configured in the default product.json. Therefore, you generate a “clean” build, without the Microsoft customizations, which is by default licensed under the MIT license
Norway to Track All Supermarket Purchases - Life in Norway #privacy
Statistics Norway wants to receive several million daily receipts from food stores, signalling a new era in state data collection. Privacy advocates and the supermarkets themselves are unhappy.
People living in Norway are used to big government. But the latest news coming out of Oslo is a surprising new step down the road of data collection that not everyone is happy with.
Japan tested a giant turbine that generates electricity using deep ocean currents #energy #technology #futurism
Kairyu is the company's most recent prototype, which weights 330 tons. A large fuselage connects two counter-rotating turbine fans, allowing the entire equipment to float while attached to the sea floor, hovering between 100 and 160 feet below the surface.
It draws electricity from one of the world's strongest ocean currents off Japan's eastern coast to power its massive turbines.
The business was able to generate roughly 100 kilowatts of steady electricity during demonstrations earlier this year. IHI Corp plans to generate two megawatts during subsequent testing, with commercial operations beginning in the 2030s, according to Bloomberg.
A new randomized controlled study of LSD microdosing has failed to find evidence that the psychedelic practice results in improvements to mood or cognition. The research has been published in the journal Addiction Biology.
Microdosing refers to the practice of consuming small amounts of a psychedelic drug at regular intervals. Preliminary research has indicated that microdosing is associated with a range of psychological benefits, such as increased productivity and reduced stress. But these studies have not utilized randomized placebo-controlled methodologies — the gold standard for proving causation.
Hydrogen-powered cars. Biological, then quantum computing. Gene-therapy cancer treatments. An end to the War on Drugs. Reliable automatic translation. The impending end of the nation-state. Man setting foot on Mars. These are just a few of the developments in store for our world by the year 2020 — or so, at any rate, predicts “The Long Boom,” the cover story of a 1997 issue of Wired magazine, the official organ of 1990s techno-optimism. “We’re facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world,” declares the cover itself. “You got a problem with that?”
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