Amazon Reportedly Employs Thousands of People to Listen to Your Alexa Conversations – This Week in Tech – 04/14/2019
Amazon Reportedly Employs Thousands of People to Listen to Your Alexa Conversations
Amazon (AMZN) employs a global team that transcribes the voice commands captured after the wake word is detected and feeds them back into the software to help improve Alexa’s grasp of human speech so it can respond more efficiently in the future, Bloomberg reports…
China Wants to Ban Bitcoin Mining
SHANGHAI/HONG KONG (Reuters) – China’s state planner wants to eliminate bitcoin mining in the country, according to a draft list of industrial activities the agency is seeking to stop in a sign of growing government pressure on the cryptocurrency sector…
More Jails Replace In-Person Visits With Awful Video Chat Products
After April 15, inmates at the Adult Detention Center in Lowndes County, Mississippi will no longer be allowed to visit with family members face to face. Newton County, Missouri, implemented an in-person visitor ban last month. The Allen County Jail in Indiana phased out in-person visits earlier this year…
Amazon Shareholders Set to Vote on a Proposal to Ban Sales of Facial Recognition Tech to Governments
Amazon shareholders will vote in May on a proposal to ban the sale of facial recognition technology to governments after beating an attempt by Amazon itself to quash the proposal before it got to a vote…
Facebook Spent $22.6m to Keep Mark Zuckerberg Safe Last Year
Facebook more than doubled the money it spent on top executive Mark Zuckerberg’s security in 2018 to $22.6m, a regulatory filing has showed…
Galaxy S10 5G Owners Say It Drops Internet When Switching to 4G, Forcing Reboots
Citing posts owners have made on Internet sites, Business Korea is reporting that many Galaxy S10 5G owners are having connectivity problems when the handset switches from 5G to LTE. The phone apparently has no issue connecting to 5G networks, but when folks move away from 5G and need to connect to LTE, data service is turned off and they lose a connection to the internet…
These Tree-Planting Drones Are Firing Seed Missiles to Restore the World’s Forests
In a remote field south of Yangon, Myanmar, tiny mangrove saplings are now roughly 20 inches tall. Last September, the trees were planted by drones. It’s early proof of technology that could help restore forests at the pace needed to fight climate change…