In The News

TikTok Pulls Out of Hong Kong: TechCrunch

Rita Liao July 7, 2020
TikTok is the world’s most popular short video app, but politicians around the world express “concerns that it could be used by the Beijing government as a surveillance and propaganda tool,” explains Rita Liao for TechCrunch. India has banned TikTok, along with more than 50 other Chinese apps, and the United States may follow. TikTok announced plans to pull out of Hong Kong, where China has...

Tech Didn’t Stop Covid-19: MIT Technology Review

David Rotman June 23, 2020
The world received early warnings about Covid-19’s high transmission and mortality rates in early January, weeks before the disease took beyond China where it originated. Muddled communications, slow development of tests, fragmented data collection systems and equipment shortages compounded the spread. “In an age of big data in which companies like Google and Amazon use all sorts of personal...

Tracking COVID-19 with Air Travel Data: Rand

Russell Hanson, Christopher A. Mouton, Adam R. Grissom and John P. Godges June 15, 2020
Rand Corporation researchers have developed a Covid-19 air-traffic visualization tool that combines case data from Johns Hopkins University with travel data from the International Air Transport Association. “Together, these data sets make it possible to visualize how coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infections and commercial air travel have interacted to export infection risk across the world...

Cybersecurity for Infrastructure: Project Syndicate

Marietje Schaake and Stéphane Duguin June 9, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic underscores society’s reliance on infrastructure, including the internet for communication and data exchanges as well as health-care systems. Malevolent forces target social media with disinformation and hospitals and laboratories with ransomware, phishing and other malicious programs. Over the past two months, such attacks have occurred every three days, yet governments...

Automatic Deletes for Chinese Communist Party: CNBC

Sam Shead June 2, 2020
Social media platforms are highly automated, and when errors occur, fixes can take months – unless a high-profile user complains. For months, YouTube’s automated comment filters were set to delete comments containing Chinese phrases, “communist bandit” and “50-cent party” – phrases mostly linked to criticism of the Chinese Communist Party, though the platform deleted positive comments using those...

Sewage Reveals Covid-19 Totals: New Haven Register

Ed Stannard and Justin Papp May 28, 2020
Analysis of human waste could become a Covid-19 surveillance tool, providing early warnings about increases in cases and hotspots. An analysis of solid waste from a New Haven waste-treatment facility over 40 days shows that the amount of SARS-CoV-2 found in samples correlates with testing totals and hospitalizations, reports a multidisciplinary team of researchers with Yale University and the...

Green Tech, Covid-19 Hit Nuclear Power: Bloomberg

Lars Paulsson and Rachel Morison May 10, 2020
As electricity demand declined across the world due to Covid-19 lockdowns and economic contraction, renewable energies have taken a bigger share of the global energy market after many nations decided to give green technologies priority on the grid. The pandemic worsened the outlook for nuclear power stations, already struggling to break even. For many years, atomic reactors in Europe coexisted...