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Bill Gates says “real invention” is needed to stop online election and medical “misinformation”

In an appearance on NBC’s Today show, Bill Gates was asked about online “misinformation” and what he thought about Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in relation to that.

The discussion about misinformation started with host Savannah Guthrie saying: “When you look at how the US and the world responded to COVID-19, whether it’s masks or vaccines or shutdowns, closures, it’s become so political…It’s been so politicized.”

Gates responded: “Yeah, it’s unfortunate that we didn’t get trusted voices in both parties talking about the benefit of masks and vaccines so that it wasn’t a political issue.”

Guthrie then asked about misinformation, noting that it has “been a hallmark” of the pandemic.

“President Biden rather famously said last July that misinformation on social media is killing people. Do you agree?” she asked.
Gates said: “Absolutely…It’s terrible.”

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STATEN ISLAND DA BOUGHT CLEARVIEW FACE RECOGNITION SOFTWARE WITH CIVIL FORFEITURE CASH

THE STATEN ISLAND district attorney’s use of the highly controversial Clearview face recognition system included attempts to dig up the social media accounts of homicide victims and was paid for with equally controversial asset forfeiture cash, according to city records provided to The Intercept.

Clearview has garnered international attention and intense criticism for its simple premise: What if you could instantly identify anyone in the world with only their picture? Using billions of images scraped from social media sites, Clearview sells police and other governmental agencies the ability to match a photo to a name using face recognition, no search warrant required — a power civil libertarians and privacy advocates say simply places too much unsupervised power in the hands of police.

The use of Clearview by the Staten Island district attorney’s office was first reported by Gothamist, citing city records obtained by the Legal Aid Society. Subsequent records procured via New York State Freedom of Information Law request and provided to The Intercept now confirm the initial concerns about the tool’s largely unsupervised use by prosecutors. According to spokesperson Ryan Lavis, the DA’s office “completely stopped utilizing Clearview as an investigative tool last year.”

Yet the documents provide new information about how Staten Island prosecutors used the notorious face recognition tool and show that the software was paid for with funds furnished by the Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing Program. The program lets state and local police hand seized cash and property over to a federal law enforcement agency, whereupon up to 80 percent of the proceeds are then sent back the original state or local department to pocket.

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Another Food Processing Plant Catches Fire Amid Bizarre String of Incidents Across US

Two more food processing plants exploded in flames this weekend.

All this comes at a time when experts are talking about global food shortages as the nasty surprise in store for the world in 2022.

No one was injured in the fire at a Perdue soybean plant in Norfolk, Virginia, according to WAVY-TV, and the cause had not yet been determined.

“Chesapeake firefighters battled an industrial fire this evening at Perdue Farms in the South Norfolk area,” The Chesapeake Fire Department posted on its Facebook page.

“Plant operators reported a fire in large soybean processing tank. Firefighters climbed multiple flights of stairs with hose and equipment to access the standpipe system. Water was applied and the fire brought under control in approximately one hour,” the post read.

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Delete your personal data from Google

Google now has a new tool allowing anyone to request the removal of their personal data from search results, including contact information.

“The availability of personal contact information online can be jarring,” said Google’s head of global policy in search Michelle Chang. She added that personal data could lead to “unwanted direct contact or even physical harm.”

Google already allowed the removal of personal or financial information from search results if a user could prove it was real danger or a potential threat. Now you can request the removal of your information even if there is no risk.

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Congress Thinks The Pentagon Is Not Taking UFO Reports Seriously After Latest Briefings

Lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees are unimpressed with the classified progress reports on UFOs they received in a briefing Monday, according to Politico.

Though the office is not expected to be fully operational until June, members of the committees have said that national security agencies aren’t taking reports of highly advanced aircraft of unknown origins seriously enough, Politico reported.

Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act four months ago, which required the Pentagon to create an Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office to thoroughly investigate and analyze UFOs or “unidentified aerial phenomena,” according to the legislation.

The creation of the office was spearheaded by Democratic New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who reportedly believes that the “DoD needs to take this issue much more seriously and get in motion,” one of her aides told Politico following the briefing. Her sentiments were mirrored by Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

Rubio is reportedly “frustrated” that the office is “not moving fast enough, not doing enough, not sharing enough,” an aide told Politico.

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Black Secret Service Agent, Jailed for JFK Plot Warning, Cleared: The Full Story

On April 26, President Joe Biden pardoned Abraham Bolden, an 87-year-old who was the first Black man to join the presidential Secret Service security detail.

Bolden’s presidential pardon — for a ginned-up 1964 bribery conviction based on the testimony of witnesses who later admitted to lying — was the first introduction for many Americans to Bolden. The pardon statement characterized him as a brave and noble advocate for racial justice, who spoke out against the racist behavior of other Secret Service agents, and who maintained his innocence during his bribery trials and subsequent prison term. 

But neither Biden nor the international news media that briefly picked up on Bolden’s pardon mentioned the explosive core issue: the ex-agent’s role in trying to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 

To this day, Bolden believes that it was his warnings about problems with the Secret Service prior to Kennedy’s death, his knowledge of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy in an early November trip to Chicago, and his efforts to share what he knew with the Warren Commission that led to his being targeted with false charges. 

This crucial context was not included in the White House press release, nor in most of the press coverage.

“I think readers don’t understand at all,” Bolden told WhoWhatWhy. “They just understand that I was pardoned. 

“They don’t have the details of what occurred and what it had to do with the assassination of President Kennedy, how I was treated, the reason for my incarceration, the effort to declare me insane. Or the fact that I wrote a book that explained everything. That’s not before the public.” 

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Anarchist Collective Shares Instructions to Make DIY Abortion Pills

With the Supreme Court poised to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, an anarchist collective that makes DIY medicine has released detailed instructions for making abortion pills. The group has previously released instructions for making a DIY Epipen and for making daraprim, the pill that made “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli infamous.  

The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective first demonstrated how to make misoprostol tablets, which are used to induce an abortion, at the Please Try This at Home conference in Pittsburgh in 2019. Last year, after Texas passed a near total abortion ban, Mixael Laufer, who runs the collective, published a 17-minute video explaining how to make the pills at home.

“The first thing to mention is this has been put together with a little bit of haste,” Laufer says. “There’s been a great deal of panic because the Republic of Texas has gotten up to some shenanigans to benefit people who are in power and to keep a bunch of other people powerless.”

Laufer repeatedly shared the video again Monday night after a leaked court decision showed that the Supreme Court is planning to overturn Roe v. Wade, which would automatically trigger total abortion bans in nearly half of U.S. states. When a Twitter user asked if there was a writeup of their “hypothetical” abortion pill manufacturing process, Laufer responded with a link to the video.

“Not hypothetical at all. Go forth and rock it,” Laufer tweeted. 

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Algorithms are being used to help determine if kids should be taken from their parent

The limitations of algorithms today in terms of accuracy regarding context and nuance is evident even to a casual observer, most notably in the often blundering automated censorship on social networks.

Notwithstanding that state of affairs as far as limitations of the technology itself, without even taking into account intent of those behind it, social workers in the US have started relying on predictive algorithms in deciding when to investigate parents suspected of child neglecting.

The stakes are higher here than having a Facebook post deleted – these parents can eventually end up having their children removed, and the algorithm that is now in use in several US states, and spreading, is described by the AP as “opaque” – all the while providing social workers with statistical calculations that they can base their actions on.

Other concerns raised around the algorithms like the one used in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County – that was the subject of a Carnegie Mellon University study – are reliability, which is entirely expected, as well as the effect of “hardening racial disparities in the child welfare system.”

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