Victoria Police tried out Clearview AI but it was crap so they didn’t use it further
Microsoft encourages governments to regulate app stores of all kinds
WWDC 2020 rumourmonging (aka ARM based Macs)
TSMC gaining semiconductor ascendance has fascinating geopolitical ramifications
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When Clearview AI's dodgy business of building a giant database of everyone's face by scraping Facebook and other social media sites then selling it to the cops was made public a few months ago, journalists all over Australia asked all our police forces if they use it. Victoria Police said no at the time but thanks to a freedom of information request placed by Justin Warren, we now know they received a sales pitch from Clearview AI ("Google for faces", "try your friends or family", "it's the best way to quickly see the power of Clearview in real time") and submitted a "small number of publicly available stock images" to test its capability. Victoria Police ultimately decided it was too shit to use in real investigations and stuck with iFace for "conducting searches against the offender image database for intelligence and investigative purposes".
Microsoft's thrown in its two cents regarding Apple's threats to kick email service Hey's app off the App Store and moves by the EU to investigate Apple's App Store business practices. In an interview, Microsoft's chief legal officer Brad Smith said that "the time has come" for government regulation about app store rules, pricing and tools to see if "there is really a justification in antitrust law for everything that has been created". Basically Microsoft's saying, yes, governments, please investigate those bastards at Apple. Microsoft obviously has skin in the game here, with many apps on Apple's platforms they'd love to sell directly on (e.g: buy a subscription to Office within the app) but also don't want to give Apple a 30% cut of their revenue or raise the price for iOS users by 30%.
And on the topic of Apple, their WWDC conference is tomorrow morning at 3AM AEST. If you didn't already know, the entire thing is streaming online due to COVID-19. You can download a Mac and iOS app (fuck you to Windows I guess) to follow along. The biggest expectation of this year's conference is the announcement of moving Macs to use ARM CPUs. Jean-Louis Gassée has an article about how Apple and Microsoft want this to happen. Ming-Chi Kuo reckons an all-new iMac will be released with an Intel CPU now, replaced with an ARM CPU in 2021. Software wise, everything will get an update, it's just a matter of what's changing. The Verge outlines what they reckon will happen on all of Apple's operating systems.
If you wonder why I sometimes crap on here about what is seemingly esoteric semiconductor news, Steve Blank's latest article is a good explanation of why this niche of technology is worth keeping an eye on. In it he explains how Taiwan/TSMC's dominance in semi-conductor manufacturing, the USA/Intel's fall from grace plus ban of TSMC from dealing with Huawei and China's massive boner for wanting to be king of the world with the spice of Hong Kong's situation added in - all mixes together for a potential World War 3 situation if handled poorly. There's far more to this issue than simply Huawei or ZTE not being able to sell the latest smartphones.
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🎶 Minus - Beck
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