This Week in Tech

Google Has Slowed Down YouTube on Firefox and Edge – Mozilla Exec – This Week in Tech – 07/29/2018

Google Has Slowed Down YouTube on Firefox and Edge – Mozilla Exec

Mozilla technical programme manager Chris Peterson stated that Google has deliberately slowed down the performance of YouTube on Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Edge web browsers, CNET reported…


Amazon’s Facial Recognition Matched 28 Members of Congress to Criminal Mugshots

The American Civil Liberties Union tested Amazon’s facial recognition system — and the results were not good. To test the system’s accuracy, the ACLU scanned the faces of all 535 members of congress against 25,000 public mugshots, using Amazon’s open Rekognition API. None of the members of Congress were in the mugshot lineup, but Amazon’s system generated 28 false matches, a finding that the ACLU says raises serious concerns about Rekognition’s use by police…


Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Loses More Than $15 Billion in Wealth in a Single Day

Facebook made history as the biggest one-day wipeout of stock market value for any U.S. company. The company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a personal hit of more than $15 billion just one day after the company said its growth is slowing…


24 People Have Now Been Sentenced in India-Based Phone-Scam Case

A total of 24 people who pleaded guilty to their involvement in a massive years-long phone scam often involving fake Internal Revenue Service and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services officials have now been given prison sentences from four to 20 years…


The $3 Billion Plan to Turn Hoover Dam Into a Giant Battery

Hoover Dam helped transform the American West, harnessing the force of the Colorado River — along with millions of cubic feet of concrete and tens of millions of pounds of steel — to power millions of homes and businesses. It was one of the great engineering feats of the 20th century…


For Facebook and Twitter, Reality Is Hitting Hard

Just as Facebook and Twitter face slowing user growth after attracting nearly half the world’s population to their respective services, coordinated campaigns of harassment and abuse have begun to show their effects. User counts are dropping and stock prices are in freefall…


23andMe Is Sharing Its 5 Million Clients’ Genetic Data with Drug Giant GlaxoSmithKline

Popular genetics-testing company 23andMe is partnering with drug giant GlaxoSmithKline to use people’s DNA to develop medical treatments, the company announced in a blog post yesterday (July 25)…