Yesterday, during his quarterly earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed a new piece of hardware that the company is working on to perform all the calculations required to advance the self-driving capabilities of its vehicles. The specialized chip, known as "Hardware 3," will be "swapped into the Model S, X, and 3," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Tesla has thus far relied on Nvidia's Drive platform. So why switch now? By building things in-house, Tesla say it's able to focus on its own needs for the sake of efficiency. "We had the benefit [...] of knowing what our neural networks look like, and what they'll look like in the future," said Pete Bannon, director of the Hardware 3 project. Bannon also noted that the hardware upgrade should start rolling out next year. "The key," adds Elon "is to be able to run the neural network at a fundamental, bare metal level. You have to do these calculations in the circuit itself, not in some sort of emulation mode, which is how a GPU or CPU would operate. You want to do a massive amount of [calculations] with the memory right there." The final outcome, according to Elon, is pretty dramatic: He says that whereas Tesla's computer vision software running on Nvidia's hardware was handling about 200 frames per second, its specialized chip is able to crunch out 2,000 frames per second "with full redundancy and failover." Plus, as AI analyst James Wang points out, it gives Tesla more control over its own future.

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A day after returning to country following 11 years away, opposition leader lodges papers with electoral commission.

Outgoing president grants refugees two-year temporary residency permits, allowing them to study and get medical care.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Korea Times: The government will move quickly to impose taxes on Google, Apple, Amazon and other global IT companies. This follows policymakers and lawmakers paying greater attention to growing criticism that the firms earn billions of dollars in sales here annually but pay no taxes. Naver, Kakao and other domestic companies have been complaining for years about "an uneven playing field," arguing their foreign rivals should pay corporate income tax on the revenue they generate in Korea. Under the law, the government is unable to tax global companies as it is not mandatory for them to disclose their sales and operating profit here. The Corporate Tax Act stipulates that global companies must pay taxes when they have fixed places of business in Korea. This law has provided global companies with an excuse to avoid taxes while they expand their businesses rapidly here as their bases are established in other countries such as the United States, China and Ireland. Ahn Jeong-sang, a policy advisor to the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, said: "Under the current law, preliminary or ancillary places of business are not regarded as global companies' offices in Korea, and this has played a role in their tax avoidance. Considering the characteristics of the digital economy, the concept of fixed places of business needs to be expanded so that the government can secure authority to impose taxes on them."

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Nestle SA is putting some of its Gerber baby food products on a food-tracking blockchain to test whether the technology can trace the fruits and vegetables that go into its purees and squeezable pouches. From a report: Nestle's effort is part of a wider food-industry exercise aimed at improving food recalls by using the technology behind bitcoin to trace a worldwide ingredient supply chain. Food recalls can diminish consumer confidence and lead to lost sales. News of tainted baby food hits an especially sensitive nerve -- stakes that in part prompted Nestle to choose a popular variety of its Gerber linefor its blockchain test, said Chris Tyas, global head of supply chain at the Swiss company. Nestle offers more than 2,000 brands, including Haagen-Dazs, Stouffer's and Poland Spring. Nestle also sees the move as a way to generate customer trust everyday and during recalls. "People want to know, quite rightly, where ingredients they give to their baby have come from," he said. "We wanted a product in which trust meant something."

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Bangladesh shuts down high schools as tens of thousands of students take to streets after two teens were killed by bus.

Initial phase of first river taxi service will launch in September and cross between two banks of the Tigris.

A new study has shown that small height evolved twice in humans on the Indonesian island of Flores.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For decades, the district south of downtown and alongside San Francisco Bay here was known as either Rincon Hill, South Beach or South of Market. This spring, it was suddenly rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the East Cut. The peculiar moniker immediately spread digitally, from hotel sites to dating apps to Uber, which all use Google's map data. The name soon spilled over into the physical world, too. Real-estate listings beckoned prospective tenants to the East Cut. And news organizations referred to the vicinity by that term. "It's degrading to the reputation of our area," said Tad Bogdan, who has lived in the neighborhood for 14 years. In a survey of 271 neighbors that he organized recently, he said, 90 percent disliked the name. The swift rebranding of the roughly 170-year-old district is just one example of how Google Maps has now become the primary arbiter of place names. With decisions made by a few Google cartographers, the identity of a city, town or neighborhood can be reshaped, illustrating the outsize influence that Silicon Valley increasingly has in the real world.

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I use Twitter as a very nice identity system for my browser-based apps. To see how it works, log onto Radio3, MyWord, feedBase, LO2 or Little Card Editor.

The service Twitter provides is simple. I send you over there to log in, and in return I get your unique screenname and a bit of info about you (the stuff you put into your profile). A few other bits, like when you created your Twitter account.

I also get the ability to post in your name, but my software never uses that ability unless you specifically ask it to. For example, there's a tweet icon in LO2 that lets you send the text of the cursor headline to Twitter as a tweet. Nice functionality to have, but hardly mission-critical.

I'm concerned that at some point Twitter may decide not to allow this use. I would prefer if they tightened the restrictions on posting, maybe eliminate it, that would be okay. But I would have a problem if they canceled the service.

Pretty sure nothing this simple exists in the open source world. I could be wrong. Either way this is something we should have, and it should be good. debugged, well burned-in. It would be nice if a public foundation ran the service, the way Twitter does. I know, keep dreaming.

New submitter nleskovic shares a report: When Authenticated Reality launched last year, it seemed that the company had struck gold in terms of market demand and fit. The Austin-based startup had developed a Web browser that would require users to prove they are who they say they are. Users would have to sign up for an account -- scanning their driver's license and taking a photo -- in order to download the browser, which would sit "on top" of the Internet, said Chris Ciabarra, Authenticated Reality's co-founder, in an interview last year. "Everybody knows who everybody is," he said. So, when Facebook announced this week that its site was, once again, home to inauthentic pages and accounts designed to influence the outcome of the upcoming midterm Congressional elections, I contacted Ciabarra to find out how the company was doing. But, he said Wednesday that he had shut down the startup just a month after its debut. He said people who had heard about Authenticated Reality from media reports were visiting the firm's offices in California and threatening employees. (The addresses were listed on the website.) "It was getting kind of scary," he told me. "They were thinking we were taking their freedom away because they had to sign up using a driver's license. They thought we were trying to follow them."

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The publicly-listed US company crowned a decade-long rise fueled by its ubiquitous iPhone.

It's time for them to bet on radicalism.

Nikhil Sonnad, in Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason:

…the imperative to “connect people” lacks the one ingredient essential for being a good citizen: Treating individual human beings as sacrosanct. To Facebook, the world is not made up of individuals, but of connections between them. The billions of Facebook accounts belong not to “people” but to “users,” collections of data points connected to other collections of data points on a vast Social Network, to be targeted and monetized by computer programs.

There are certain things you do not in good conscience do to humans. To data, you can do whatever you like.

The strikes, which hit near the city's main public hospital, killed at least 20 and wounded dozens, medics said.