Current News/Innovations

The FAA announced today that it has restricted drone use over  several national US landmarks , including the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore. The FAA says the new restrictions are in place at the request of US security and law enforcement agencies. Under the new restriction, drones will no longer be able to fly within 400 feet of the following sites: Statue of Liberty National Monument, New York, NY Boston National Historical Park (U.S.S. Constitution), Boston, MA Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia, PA Folsom Dam; Folsom, CA Glen Canyon Dam; Lake Powell, AZ Grand Coulee Dam; Grand Coulee, WA Hoover Dam; Boulder City, NV Jefferson National Expansion Memorial; St. Louis, MO Mount Rushmore National Memorial; Keystone, SD Shasta Dam; Shasta Lake, CA This expands the FAA’s current list of no-fly zones, which includes some army bases, major sports stadiums, national parks, and major airports. Last month, the Pentagon approved a measure...

Facing scrutiny from Congress, Twitter  today disclosed  that more than 200 Russia-linked accounts had been used to spread propaganda and misinformation on the company’s platform. Twitter’s blog post, while not quite directly attributing any activity to those accounts, discussed what the company does to combat issues like gaming Trending Topics and automating spam. The company noted that a large source of spam had historically been from “Russia and other post-Soviet states,” but said it was “much trickier” tracking activity coordinated by humans. The news follows similar disclosures from Facebook. Twitter points out that it found 22 accounts corresponding to those Facebook found. Additionally, Twitter found another 179 accounts. All of those accounts, Twitter said, had been or were soon banned, usually for violating spam rules. Unlike on Facebook, Twitter said the accounts it identified were not registered as advertisers. The blog post also discussed Russia Today, ...

Netflix today announced its plans to invest at least $400 million in Canadian film and TV productions over the next five years,  Variety  reports . It’s the first time the streaming service has launched a permanent production presence outside the US. The plan is part of a deal between Netflix and the Canadian government to support innovation in the digital realm,  according to Vancouver’s  News 1130 . Netflix will reportedly create TV shows and movies in both English and French, as well as work with local Canadian producers and studios. If Netflix fails to commit to the agreed-upon investment in the given timeline, the Canadian government can apparently impose fines on the company,  News 1130  reports. “Today’s announcement affirms there’s more to come as Netflix launches Netflix Canada, our permanent production presence in Canada,” Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, said in a statement to  Variety . “We look forward to co...

Too many jobs and too few homes have resulted in a disastrous housing crisis in the Bay Area, especially in  Silicon Valley  where much-needed stock is often derailed. But the most recent example doesn’t come from area  politicos  or baby boomers. This time it’s Google threatening to make a bad situation worse. “In a standoff with city officials, Google is demanding more office space for its futuristic new  ‘Charleston East’  campus and is threatening to block nearly 10,000 units of critically needed housing if it doesn’t get its way,” reports  Ethan Baron of   Bay Area News Group . The city gave the tech mammoth preliminary approval to construct 9,850 homes (of which 1,600 would be affordable) in the North Bayshore development. But now Google wants 800,000 square feet of new office space in addition to the the “3.6 million contained in the draft North Bayshore plan.” Rendering via Alphabet More office space would offset the worker-to-hou...

Moscow’s local government has formally announced the deployment of facial recognition technology on a “city-wide” network of CCTV cameras. The system has been undergoing tests  for close to a year , but the city’s Department of Information Technology today revealed new details of the project, including its licensing agreement with Russian startup NTechLab for the facial recognition software itself. Speaking to  The Verge , the chief information officer of the Department of Information Technology, Artem Ermolaev, said the project is still “somewhere between” testing and finished, but has already led to six arrests. “We connected to a federal list of [wanted criminals] for the past two months, and arrested six persons, who hadn’t been caught for several years,” said Ermolaev. What’s particularly unclear at this point is to what degree the system is automated. Ermolaev says that there are “several ways” to use the technology. Sometimes, he says, the system scans for faces th...

Google's  Family Link app  lets parents hand down their old Android gadgets to their kids without worrying about what they could end up downloading from the Play Store or finding online. They just have to create a Google account for their kids and download the app, which went public today.  Until now , parents had to request an invite and hope that Google followed up. Family Link allows parents to approve or block apps that their kids want to download from the Play Store, monitor their screen time and the apps they're accessing, set device time limits, and remotely lock their kid's device for bedtime or studying. Google is directly targeting Amazon and its  kid-friendly Fire tablets  with Family Link. Amazon's tablets always let parents set screen time limits, and it recently began letting parents retrieve more granular data on the apps their kids are using and even the books and websites they're accessing. It also launched a  new parent-oriented dashb...

Samsung’s  Gear IconX  aren’t the best earbuds in the truly wireless earbuds game — but for today, at least, they might be the best value. Samsung has the original version of the  IconX on   sale  for $49.99 right now. It’s apparently a “closeout sale,” which means that Samsung is trying to get rid of every unit it’s got left. That makes enough sense, since  a new model of the IconX  is coming out later this fall. The IconX were announced in June 2016 and originally sold for $200. They were fine enough earbuds, but they weren’t worth the price. Their sound and Bluetooth performance were okay, but battery life was really weak: the IconX are only supposed to be able to stream music for about an hour and a half at a time. So while $50 might not be a bad deal if you want a pair of wireless earbuds for occasional use, their overall use is really limited. Samsung’s new model of the IconX,  the IconX 2018 , is entirely designed to address its batter...