Hal Hodson, a correspondent for Economist writes in a Twitter thread: Something really massive is happening, and I feel like society is barely grasping the tendrils of the implications. Technology is eroding one of the great levees of human society -- the ability to move around the physical world anonymously. This is happening because computers are getting better at spotting patterns in data, and the cost of capturing data that contain patterns about human beings is plummeting. Most adult humans have a device in their pocket capable of recognizing the patterns in another human's face. Face recognition is just the most obvious side of this new reality. It's easy to grasp that a computer can remember what your face looks like, because humans can do that too (not that well though). But computers don't care what data is used to tag you, only that the data is unique. You can measure someone's: heartbeat with a laser; breathing with the RF-waves in wifi; walking gait with a camera; geographical movements through their phone; and voice and emotional state through a microphone. These datasets all hold patterns which uniquely ID a person. Pretty much anyone can "scan" anyone at this point. The hard bit is matching the patterns in that data with a person's legal identity, figuring out to whom a pattern belongs. This means that control of and access to identity systems is more important than it has ever been before. The issue is that currently the world does not expect to be identified anywhere at any time, by anyone. Society runs on the assumption that people are unknowable in some spaces. I don't know what happens as that disappears, but I am worried. It's easy to imagine bad actors gathering all the data they can on everyone they can get their hands on. Doesn't matter if it isn't linked with an ID right now. Store it, and when someone becomes a threat, do the work to ID them in stored data, find something to get them with. Legal systems need to recreate and/or reinforce some of the levees that cheap compute and sensing are washing away. Maybe folks want to live in a world where anyone can set a drone or autonomous agent to track a person around town and report their movements. I don't think so. Addedum: the direction of travel is crystal clear here. Cheaper sensors, closer to the body and mind, coupled with ever-cheaperbetter computation. You can't rely on nature for "privacy" any more. You have to do it for ourselves, if you want.

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US officials familiar with the intelligence on May drone attacks say they originated in Iraq, not Yemen, WSJ reports.

H. Claire Brown, reporting for The New Food Economy: GrubHub's commission fees had been inching upward over the years she'd [anecdote in the story] been working with the platform. There was the flat transaction fee, which hovered around 3 or 4 percent. Then there were marketing fees and costs for additional promotions. Shivane says she feels like the platform is increasingly pay to play: Spend more to promote your restaurant, and see your search rankings rise. Cut down on marketing spend, and watch your restaurant fall to the bottom of the page and lose sales. "It's putting us in a financial hole. Last month, I paid $7,000 to GrubHub. That's my rent for the month," Shivane says. The New Food Economy viewed the company's invoice to Shivane's restaurant -- it was actually $8,000. We agreed to use only her first name and last initial in this story because she still uses the platform and fears the company could retaliate by dropping her restaurant to the bottom of its search rankings. Frustrated, Shivane started exploring other options. She says she thought about bulking up her restaurant's web presence and offering orders on her own site through a different service, one that offered a flat monthly rate and no commission fee. There was just one problem: Someone already owned the web domain that matched her restaurant's name. She looked up the buyer. It was GrubHub. The New Food Economy has found that GrubHub owns more than 23,000 web domains. Its subsidiary, Seamless, owns thousands. We've published the full list here. Most of them appear to correlate with the names of real restaurants. The company's most recent purchase was in May of this year. Grubhub purchased three different domains containing versions of Shivane's restaurant's name -- in 2012, 2013, and 2014. "I never gave them permission to do that," she says.

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Trade war between the US and China is creating divisions as Japan hosts leaders of the world's 20 largest economies.

U.S. intelligence agencies are encouraging American research universities to develop protocols for monitoring students and visiting scholars from Chinese state-affiliated research institutions, as U.S. suspicion toward China spreads to academia. From a report: Since last year, FBI officials have visited at least 10 members of the Association of American Universities, a group of 62 research universities, with an unclassified list of Chinese research institutions and companies. Universities have been advised to monitor students and scholars associated with those entities on American campuses, according to three administrators briefed at separate institutions. FBI officials have also urged universities to review ongoing research involving Chinese individuals that could have defense applications, the administrators say. "We are being asked what processes are in place to know what labs they are working at or what information they are being exposed to," Fred Cate, vice president of research at Indiana University, tells NPR. "It's not a question of just looking for suspicious behavior -- it's actually really targeting specific countries and the people from those countries." In a statement responding to NPR's questions, the FBI said it "regularly engages with the communities we serve. As part of this continual outreach, we meet with a wide variety of groups, organizations, businesses, and academic institutions. The FBI has met with top officials from academia as part of our ongoing engagement on national security matters."

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James Alex Fields Jr killed Heather Heyer when he drove his car into counterprotesters at the 2017 Unite the Right rally

Microsoft's transformation into a fully paid-up member of the Linux love-train continued this week as the Windows giant sought to join the exclusive club that is the official linux-distros mailing list. From a report: The purpose of the linux-distros list is used by Linux distributions to privately report, coordinate, and discuss security issues yet to reach the general public; oss-security is there for stuff that is already out in the open or cannot wait for things to bounce around for a few days first. Sasha Levin, who describes himself as a "Linux kernel hacker" at the beast of Redmond, made the application for his employer to join the list, which if approved would allow Microsoft to tap into private behind-the-scenes chatter about vulnerabilities, patches, and ongoing security issues with the open-source kernel and related code. These discussions are crucial for getting an early heads up, and coordinating the handling and deployment of fixes before they are made public. To demonstrate that Microsoft qualifies for membership alongside the likes of Ubuntu, Debian, and SUSE, he cited Microsoft's Azure Sphere and the Windows Subsystem For Linux (WSL) 2 as examples of distro-like builds.

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Andrew Yang, who says he's running "the nerdiest campaign in presidential history," made an almost immediate splash when he arrived without a tie on the second night of the first presidential Democratic debate. The former head of Venture for America, a nonprofit that sends entrepreneurs into cities to help revitalize them, Yang brought his passion to the stage on how to deal with economic disruption and a universal basic income for all Americans. This is how he thinks UBI would work in America: "Oh, so it's difficult to do if you have companies like Amazon, trillion-dollar tech companies, paying literally zero in taxes while they're closing 30 percent of our stores. We'd save money on things like incarceration, homelessness services, emergency room health care, and just the value gains from having a stronger, healthier, mentally healthier population would increase GDP by $700 billion. Yang thinks his proposals for UBI and a value-added tax will help those at the bottom end of the income spectrum readjust to the changing economy. He added: "We automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and we are about to do the same thing to millions of retail jobs, call center jobs, fast food jobs, truck-driving jobs and other jobs through the economy," he said. But the debate did not go as planned for Yang, who complained that there were few times when his mic was not on. He said: "There were also a few times, FYI, where I just started talking, being like, 'Hey, I want to add something there,' and my mic was not on," Yang said while speaking to supporters after the event. "And it's this sort of thing where, it's not like if you started talking, it takes over the [conversation]. It's like I was talking, but nothing was happening. And it was like, 'Oh f---.' So that happened a bit too."

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I thought Marianne Williamson stole the show last night.

Tehran says European INSTEX payment system is operational but needs to be used for oil purchases to be useful.

Residents of Michigan city exposed to dangerous levels of lead believe the water is still unsafe four years after toxic water exposed.

Amnesty International warns Sudanese authorities against use of lethal force against protesters on Sunday.

Regional group estimates that Venezuela's exodus could reach or exceed eight million by the end of next year.

US baseball rivals Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees to face off in first MLB games in Europe

Josh Dzieza, reporting for The Verge: It's been exactly one year since President Trump pushed a golden shovel into a field in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, breaking ground on a planned Foxconn factory he called "the eighth wonder of the world." "This is one of the great deals, ever," he said at the ceremony. The proposed facility would employ more than 13,000 Wisconsin workers and manufacture high-resolution LCD screens. And it would be huge, he said. "Think of it: more than 20 million feet, and that's probably going to be a minimal number," he claimed. The factory, Trump said, was evidence he was bringing manufacturing back to the United States, "restoring America's industrial might." But Foxconn's plans were already shrinking. When then-Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker wooed the company to the state with a subsidy package that came to total $4.5 billion, Foxconn had agreed to build a "Generation 10.5" facility that manufactured 75-inch LCD screens. But days before Trump's groundbreaking, the company acknowledged it would build a much smaller "Gen6" LCD factory, a type that makes smaller screens and requires far fewer workers. It would be the first of many changes. The last year has seen the factory shrink, get canceled, reappear, and undergo other shifts chronicled below. Even now, as concrete is finally being poured, it's unclear what exactly Foxconn is building in Mount Pleasant. Industry experts shown Foxconn's building plans say it does not appear to even be the scaled-down Gen6 LCD factory. If the last year is any guide, the whipsawing is far from over.

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