Silicon Valley isn’t happy: Here’s what top tech CEOs have to say about US President Trump’s immigration order

Image: Reuters

By tech2 News Staff /  29 Jan 2017 , 11:38

US President Donald Trump has passed an executive order which halts immigration from seven Islamic nations including Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and Syria, for at least 90 days. For Syrian refugees, the ban is indefinite. Trump said that the order was to keep away radical Islamic terrorists.

This has caused a lot of furore not just among the general population, but also among technology companies.

Most of the top technology firms in the US are filled with staff who aren’t native US citizens. And logically enough, most leaders from across the technology industry spectrum have criticised this new temporary ban that Trump has issued.

Microsoft Corp, Alphabet Inc, Apple Inc, Facebook Inc and Uber Technologies and many other companies have expressed concern about the immigration order’s effects on their employees, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

Here is what the heads of top US tech companies have to say about this order.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, himself an immigrant told the Wall Street Journal that he had experienced and seen the positive impact that immigration has had on Microsoft as well as for the US and the world. He said that Microsoft Corp would continue being an advocate on the issue.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has sent an email to his employees assuring them that Apple has contacted the White House to explain the negative effects of such restrictions. Cook had also spoken about the importance of immigration, both to Apple and the US’s future, when he had visited Washington last week.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the order affected close to 187 current Googlers. “We’re upset about the impact of this order and any proposals that could impose restrictions on Googlers and their families, or that could create barriers to bringing great talent to the US. It is painful to see the personal cost of this executive order on our colleagues,” he said.

Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg put out a status on his Facebook pagestating that both his and his wife’s parents were immigrants to the US. “We need to keep this country safe, but we should do that by focusing on people who actually pose a threat. Expanding the focus of law enforcement beyond people who are real threats would make all Americans less safe by diverting resources, while millions of undocumented folks who don’t pose a threat will live in fear of deportation,” said Zuckerberg.

Digital storage firm Box’s CEO Aaron Levie said that the move was quite infuriating and morally wrong. He said that he was looking at ways to get personally involved and fight the order.

Amazon’s vice president for HR, Beth Galetti, said that a diverse workforce helps Amazon make better products for its customers. It has sent out an email to its staffers, recommending US based employees from countries in the ban-list, from travelling outside the US. It has also asked such employees to get in touch with the company if they are already outside the borders for travel or work.

Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, in a personal post on his Facebook page said, “Trump’s actions are hurting Netflix employees around the world, and are so un-American it pains us all. Worse, these actions will make America less safe (through hatred and loss of allies) rather than more safe. A very sad week, and more to come with the lives of over 600,000 Dreamers here in a America under imminent threat. It is time to link arms together to protect American values of freedom and opportunity.”

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has sent out an email to his employees titled, ‘Standing up for what’s right.’ Kalanick goes on to talk about the executive order issued by Trump and how it affects Uber drivers. He said that Uber will be reaching out to all its drivers who work in the US but go home for long breaks to be with family. These drivers affected by the order will be compensated for three months, pro bono, said Kalanick.

“While every government has their own immigration controls, allowing people from all around the world to come here and make America their home has largely been the U.S.’s policy since its founding. That means this ban will impact many innocent people—an issue that I will raise this coming Friday when I go to Washington for President Trump’s first business advisory group meeting,” he said.

Artificial intelligence used to gather insights into cancer with machine-learning platform

Image Credit: Reuters

  29 Jan 2017 , 12:54

A team of scientists has used artificial intelligence (AI) to gain insight into the biophysics of cancer with their machine-learning platform predicting a trio of reagents that generated a cancer-like phenotype in tadpoles.

The research, reported in journal Scientific Reports, showed that during these extensive experiments, the biologists observed that all the melanocytes — a mature melanin-forming cell — in a single frog larva either converted to the cancer-like form or remained completely normal.

In their study, the researchers asked their AI-derived model to answer the question of how to achieve partial melanocyte conversion within the same animal using one or more interventions.

“We wanted to see if we could break the concordance among cells, which would help us understand how cells make group decisions and determine complex body-wide outcomes,” said Tufts University’s Michael Levin, who is the paper’s corresponding author.

The AI model ultimately predicted that a precise combination of three reagents — altanserin, a 5HTR2 inhibitor; reserpine, a VMAT inhibitor, and VP16-XlCreb1, mRNA encoding constitutively active CREB — would achieve that outcome.

The team used the AI-discovered model to run 576 virtual experiments. The last try gave one precise combination of three drugs predicting partial melanocyte conversion.

“Our system predicted a three-component treatment, which we had never have come up with on our own, that achieved the exact outcome we wanted, and which we had not seen before in years of diverse experiments,” Levin added.

“Such approaches are a key step for regenerative medicine, where a major obstacle is the fact that it is usually very hard to know how to manipulate the complex networks discovered by bioinformatics and wet lab experiments in such a way as to reach a desired therapeutic outcome,” Levin noted.

He said that the team now wanted to do something different — cure a disease, control cell behaviour and regenerate tissue.

IANS

Pokemon Go crosses 4.2mn download mark after three days of official launch in South Korea

  29 Jan 2017 , 10:58

The number of people in South Korea who used the popular augmented reality game “Pokemon Go” in a single day has surpassed 4.2 million just three days after its official launch in the country, according to a survey.

WiseApp, an app analytics company, said on Friday that 4.28 million people used the AR mobile game on Thursday, up from 2.91 million people on Tuesday when Pokemon Go was officially released in the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store in South Korea, Yonhap reported.

WiseApp also said the number of people who have downloaded the game fell to 850,000 on Thursday, down from 2.83 million people on Tuesday, citing its sample survey of 17,400 smartphone users.

The app analytics company said the survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 0.74 percentage point.

“Pokemon Go” didn’t work in most parts of South Korea as the AR game uses data from Google’s mapping service, which is restricted by the Seoul government due to security concerns.

However, tens of thousands of local users have downloaded the mobile game since its launch in the US in July 2016. Game developer Niantic Inc. opened its service in South Korea earlier this week after collecting all map data available to the public.

IANS

Nokia unveils Mika, a digital assistant that’s meant only for telecom operators

Image: Reuters

  28 Jan 2017 , 15:16

Finnish telecommunications giant Nokia has created a customised digital assistant “MIKA” that will improve telecom operators’ efficiency by providing engineers faster access to critical information.

MIKA that stands for ‘Multi-purpose Intuitive Knowledge Assistant’ — is the first digital assistant trained specifically for the telecom industry, designed to provide automated assistance that saves time and frees highly skilled workers to focus on critical tasks.

“MIKA taps into the power of the Nokia AVA platform to provide quick and accurate answers, avoiding time wasted on fruitless searches. It is customised to support the specific needs of telecoms, and can deliver recommendations based on experience from networks around the world,” said Igor Leprince, Head of Global Services at Nokia, in a statement.

MIKA combines augmented intelligence with automated learning to provide access to an extensive range of tools, documents and data sources.

These include the Nokia AVA knowledge library, a repository of best practices gathered from Nokia projects around the world.

Using the knowledge library MIKA can provide recommendations based on similar issues seen in other networks.

MIKA is available via a web interface and mobile agent so that engineers can tap into its knowledge base, wherever they are.

In addition to launching MIKA, Nokia introduces ‘Predictive Repair’, a service that will enable operators to reduce costs and improve network quality by moving away from break-fix approaches to hardware maintenance.

“The care service can predict hardware failures and recommend replacements up to 14 days in advance, with up to 95 per cent accuracy,” the company said.

IANS

Twitter releases letters that reveal extent of US Government’s demands for user data

  28 Jan 2017 , 12:20

Twitter on Saturday became the latest tech giant after Yahoo, Cloudflare and Google to release national security letters (NSLs) from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that forced them to reveal user data to the government.

The tech companies have been speaking up since the last eight months about the NSLs “that came with gag orders that prevented Twitter from telling the public or the targeted users about the government’s demands in two letters it received in 2015 and 2016”, Tech Crunch reported.

The FBI recently lifted these gag orders, allowing Twitter to acknowledge the NSLs for the first time.

In the newly published NSLs, the FBI asked Twitter to turn over “the name, address, length of service, and electronic communications transactional records” of two users.

The micro-blogging site said it gave a “very limited set of data” in response to the requests and demanded more freedom in keeping their point.

“Twitter remains unsatisfied with restrictions on our right to speak more freely about national security requests we may receive, Twitter associate general counsel Elizabeth Banker wrote in a blog post.

“We would like a meaningful opportunity to challenge government restrictions when ‘classification’ prevents speech on issues of public importance,” Banker added.

Twitter has already disclosed these two letters and informed the targeted users and is suing the Department of Justice in an effort to speak more publicly about secret requests for user data.

IANS

Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox will now mark unencrypted connections as ‘not secure’

Image: Christiaan Colen, Flickr

By tech2 News Staff /  27 Jan 2017 , 14:25

Further securing the world wide web are browsers Firefox and Chrome. The two browsers will now mark all HTTP sites as not secure and use a more prominent visual indicator for the same.

The update will be available in Firefox 51 and Chrome 56, both of which must have automatically rolled out to most users by now.

HTTP is the default connection protocol used by most sites. The problem is that the data sent via this method is not secure. This includes login data, passwords, banking information, etc. Basically, data shared on HTTPS connections is encrypted. Data shared on HTTP connections on the other hand, isn’t encrypted.

Firefox will mark HTTP connections with a padlock that has a strike through it, Google Chrome will specifically label the site as ‘Not secure’ in the title bar itself.

Most browsers today do mark a secure connection as such. ArsTechnica, however, points out that browsers would not mark sites that used HTTPS frames within a HTTP page (for, say, login information) as not secure. The updates to Chrome and Firefox ensure this.

While most people are not security-minded enough to check if a site is secured or not, it’s important that we do check for this, particularly on sites that require any kind of personal, payment or login information.