“The message MBS gets from the world, from powerful countries, from the international community, is that he will get away with whatever he did or will do,” Abdullah Alaoudh, a legal scholar at Georgetown University whose father is imprisoned in Saudi Arabia, told BuzzFeed News. “Because he has money, he can control the process of oil. Therefore, everybody will go back to business as usual.”

Wow, graphene supercapacitor now has the same energy density as a lead acid battery!

ToTok chat app tells users to ignore Google’s spyware warning

adding a little scandium or zirconium goes far

Nanoscale grain improvements have big gains

"Americans love design most when we’re afraid. Just as the Depression enabled industrial design to present itself as the solution to US manufacturing woes, the 2000 to 2002 dot-com crash and 2008 recession, with their long tails, have enabled the rise of a new embrace of design and a new broadening of design’s imagined jurisdiction. This time the specific fear is that the knowledge economy is coming for everyone. Bewildered and anxious leaders, public and private, have responded by throwing in their lots with the seemingly magical knowledge-work that is design."

Patrick Howell O'Neill:

<p>Hackers have manipulated multiple Tesla cars into speeding up by 50 miles per hour. The researchers fooled the car’s Mobileye EyeQ3 camera system by subtly altering a speed limit sign on the side of a road in a way that a person driving by would almost never notice.

This <a href="https://www.mcafee.com/blogs/other-blogs/mcafee-labs/model-hacking-adas-to-pave-safer-roads-for-autonomous-vehicles/">demonstration from the cybersecurity firm McAfee</a> is the latest indication that adversarial machine learning can potentially wreck autonomous driving systems, presenting a security challenge to those hoping to commercialize the technology.

Mobileye EyeQ3 camera systems read speed limit signs and feed that information into autonomous driving features like Tesla’s automatic cruise control, said Steve Povolny and Shivangee Trivedi from McAfee’s Advanced Threat Research team.

<img src="https://cdn.technologyreview.com/i/images/screen-shot-2020-02-18-at-5.43.55-pm.png" width="100%" />

The researchers stuck a tiny and nearly imperceptible sticker on a speed limit sign. The camera read the sign as 85 instead of 35, and in testing, both the 2016 Tesla Model X and that year’s Model S sped up 50 miles per hour.</p>

Been done with Stop signs too, a year or two ago, also targeting self-driving cars (though not specifically Tesla). You'll never be able to relax in one of them.

"As panic around AI-generated fake news and videos have shown, new technologies described as overwhelmingly advanced, conceptually inscrutable, and deeply conspiratorial make for headlines that draw attention. As AI-supported disinformation technologies advance, it is possible we will see panic around these technologies wielded to justify technological closure in the name of “the public interest.” While caution and care is warranted, we should not accept fast and seemingly easy technological closures for these problems without pushing for social, cultural, legal, and historical explanations."

There is overwhelming evidence that gender biases are baked into AI tools.