FBI and DoD were actively involved in facial recognition development

Stephanie Beck
Facial recognition - Technology used on woman

The software used in everything from street cameras to drones was developed in part by the Pentagon. Internal documents made public due to a lawsuit response have shown that the US government was profoundly involved in the research and development of facial recognition software they were hoping to use for mass surveillance. The FBI and Defense Department were actively involved in R&D to help identify people from footage. According to the documents, the FBI and Department of Defense were actively involved in facial recognition software research and development in the…

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Google Play to warn users about mobile apps with known problems

L. Green
Mobile apps - Google Play on Phone

Users are already receiving warnings when they are about to download known performance issues. Google has been taking additional steps to help people downloading mobile apps from its Play store to spot the applications functioning well and those that already have known performance issues reported by individuals with similar devices. Users are starting to report having been given a heads up about applications that are known to be problematic. The new form of warning is based on data Google collects about the performance of mobile apps on user devices. This…

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Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant misses its mark

John Montgallo
Voice assistant - Job Cuts

The company is now making the largest cuts in its history to the teams working on that technology. The teams at Amazon that have been working on the Alexa voice assistant are being hit by the largest job cuts the company has ever seen. The concept of Alexa was first created by Jeff Bezos more than a decade ago on a whiteboard. In Bezos’ vision of the voice assistant, it would provide the user with help in completing a full spectrum of different tasks ranging from reading a bedtime story…

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Inventor of the first cell phone is hopeful that new tech will improve it

Jorge Gonzalez
Cell phone - Brick phone

Marty Cooper feels that this device definitely has a dark side, but he’s optimistic for its future. The first cell phone call ever made was placed in New York City on April 3, 1973, by its inventor, Martin Cooper, using a massive gray prototype gadget. He and his team at Motorola had only recently developed the technology he was testing. The device that has now managed to change the world was invented by Cooper fifty years ago. Obviously, the original cell phone looked absolutely nothing like the slim, touchscreen devices…

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