Month: March 2022

If you want to fly to Ukraine to join the war effort against Russia, a tech executive says that he will front the cash to make it happen.

The Verge originally reported that Anthony Capone, the President of mobile medical services provider DocGo, is the new founder of an LLC solely devoted to sending volunteer militants and medical personnel over to the war zone to defend Ukraine from Russia’s assault. The company, dubbed Ukrainian Democracy LLC, says on its website that it was “formed with the sole purpose of supporting the defense of Ukraine and its people,” and that its founders will provide travel and other expenses for anyone willing to join the effort.

“Ukrainian Democracy LLC’s mission is to support financially, logistically, and by providing the necessary equipment to volunteers from around the world who desire to defend Ukraine but lack the resources to join the International Legion of Defense of Ukraine,” the company alleges.

The Verge spoke with one of the company’s volunteers, a U.S. military veteran and former Army Combat Medic, who confirmed that he was taking a Thursday flight to Warsaw to join the action.

In a recent LinkedIn post, Capone said that the organization had already made contact with over “over 400 volunteers that will be going over to support the defense of Ukraine this week. All have prior military and/or medical trauma experience.” The company’s website further claims at least 21 people have already been deployed to the region.

Capone’s volunteers aren’t alone, either. The horrific humanitarian crisis spawned by Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine has inspired a variety of Westerners to express interest in joining the fight, and, actually, Ukraine is encouraging them: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently announced the formation of the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine—an organization meant to facilitate the mobilization of volunteer militants from foreign countries who may want to travel to Ukraine to join the war. Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, recently claimed that some 22,000 people from 52 different countries had already volunteered as part of this effort. Relevantly, Capone’s organization plans on sending its volunteers into Ukraine via Zelensky’s International Legion, though he clarified to The Verge that a majority of the 400 volunteers are still awaiting approval from the organization.

But while the desire to defend a besieged nation is admirable, it might not ultimately be that great of an idea. The White House and State Department have explicitly warned against civilians traveling to Ukraine to join the war. In fact, they’ve actually been urging Americans in Ukraine to do the contrary: i.e., to get out of dodge.

“Ukrainians have shown their courage and they are calling on every resource and lever they have to defend themselves. We applaud their bravery,” the State Department recently told NBC News. “However, our Travel Advisory remains: U.S. citizens should not travel to Ukraine, and those in Ukraine should depart immediately if it is safe to do so using commercial or other privately available options for ground transportation.”

Aside from the fact that it’s incredibly dangerous, it seems that such volunteering could, in fact, add to the chaos, not help it. Indeed, the prospect of an ever-growing number of Americans and Westerners fighting Russians inside Ukraine clearly has overt geopolitical ramifications—the likes of which aren’t particularly good.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. regulators on Thursday issued final rules eliminating the need for automated vehicle manufacturers to equip fully autonomous vehicles with manual driving controls to meet crash standards. No fully autonomous vehicles are currently for sale. 

Automakers and tech companies have faced significant hurdles to deploying automated driving system (ADS) vehicles without human controls because of safety standards written decades ago that assume people are in control.

Last month, General Motors Co and its self-driving technology unit Cruise petitioned the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for permission to build and deploy a self-driving vehicle without human controls like steering wheels or brake pedals.

The rules revise regulations that assume vehicles “will always have a driver’s seat, a steering wheel and accompanying steering column, or just one front outboard passenger seating position.”

“For vehicles designed to be solely operated by an ADS, manually operated driving controls are logically unnecessary,” the agency said.

The new rules, which were first proposed in March 2020, emphasize automated vehicles must provide the same levels of occupant protection as human-driven vehicles.

“As the driver changes from a person to a machine in ADS-equipped vehicles, the need to keep the humans safe remains the same and must be integrated from the beginning,” said NHTSA Deputy Administrator Steven Cliff.

NHTSA’s rule says children should not occupy what is traditionally known as the “driver’s” position, given that the driver’s seating position has not been designed to protect children in a crash, but if a child is in that seat, the car will not immediately be required to cease motion.

NHTSA said existing regulations do not currently bar deploying automated vehicles as long as they have manual driving controls, and as it continues to consider changing other safety standards, manufacturers may still need to petition NHTSA for an exemption to sell their ADS-equipped vehicles.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Karishma Singh)

On March 1, Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov posted a short video on Telegram, in which a cheery bearded soldier stood before a line of tanks clanking down a road under an overcast sky. In an accompanying post, Kadyrov assured Ukrainians that the Russian army doesn’t hurt civilians and that Vladimir Putin wants their country to determine its own fate.

In France, the CEO of a law enforcement and military training company called Tactical Systems took a screenshot of the soldier’s face and got to work. Within about an hour, using face recognition services available to anyone online, he identified that the soldier was likely Hussein Mezhidov, a Chechen commander close to Kadyrov involved in Russia’s assault on Ukraine, and found his Instagram account.

“Just having access to a computer and internet you can basically be like an intelligence agency from a film,” says the CEO, who asked to be identified as YC to avoid potential repercussions for his sleuthing. Tactical Systems’ client list includes the French armed forces and it offers training in open source intelligence gathering.

Russia’s assault on Ukraine, a conflict between two internet-savvy nations in a place with good cellular coverage, offers rich pickings for open source intelligence, or OSINT. Compiling and cross referencing public sources such as social media can reveal information such as the location or losses of military units. The abundant online photos that are the legacy of years of social networking and a handful of services that provide easy access to face recognition algorithms allow some startling feats of armchair analysis.

Not long ago, a commander or prisoner of war pictured in a news report might be recognizable only to military and intelligence analysts or their own colleagues, friends, and family. Today a stranger on the other side of the globe can use a screenshot of a person’s face to track down their name and family photos—or those of a lookalike.

WIRED used a free trial of a Russian service called FindClone to trace a photo of a man who a Ukrainian government advisor claimed to be a captured Russian soldier. It took less than five minutes to find a matching social media profile. The profile, on Russian social network VKontakte, included the teenager’s birthdate and photos of his family. It listed his place of work as “polite people/war.” The Russian phrase “polite people” is used to refer to soldiers from Russia active in Ukraine during the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Ukrainian open source intelligence group InformNapalm independently made the same connection in an earlier post claiming to identify two of the claimed captives, and confirmed in a message to WIRED that it relied in part on face recognition.

That power to identify people from afar could bring new accountability to armed conflict but also open new avenues for digital attack. Identifying—or misidentifying—people in videos or photos claimed to be from the front lines could expose them or their families to online harassment or worse. Face algorithms can be wrong and errors are more common on photos without a clear view of a person’s face, as is common for wartime images. Ukraine has a volunteer “IT Army” of computer experts hacking Russian targets on the country’s behalf.

If distant volunteers can identify combatants using face recognition, government agencies can do the same or much more. “I’m sure there are Russian analysts tracking Twitter and TikTok with access to similar if not more powerful technology who are not sharing what or who they find so openly,” says Ryan Fedasiuk, an adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

Unless you regularly follow theme park news, there’s a chance you may not realize that right now, at this very moment, a Nintendo-themed park exists. That’s partially because it’s part of Universal Studios Japan and international travel hasn’t exactly been easy for most of us in the past few years. But next year, fans who want to “a-go” to a world of Nintendo can do so right here in the United States.

Universal Studios Hollywood today announced that its very own Super Nintendo World expansion will be opening in 2023. When in 2023? Well, the company isn’t saying just yet. But that the park is ready to commit to a year is the first step in showing that progress is nearing its conclusion.

There’s no official word on what specifically is going to be in the land, but it’s rumored that it will, in large part, be similar to what can currently be found in Japan. That includes a high-speed Mario Kart ride, tamer Yoshi ride, and full theming to make you feel like you’re in a game of Super Mario Bros. You can visit the official Japanese site, which has a version in English, at this link to see a ton of new images.

But fans who are visiting Universal Studios Hollywood before the opening won’t leave without a little Nintendo in their lives. In addition to views of construction from multiple angles across the park, the Feature Presentation retail shop inside the park will start stocking a ton of Nintendo merchandise soon. Again, no specific word on a date, but it’ll be much sooner than the park itself will be open.

Having visited multiple franchise-themed theme park expansions over the past few years —including the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, Avatar: The World of Pandora, and Avengers Campus—I think only Galaxy’s Edge beats this in terms of excitement. I’ve been playing Nintendo games for as long as I can remember. And now, finally, I’ll get to step inside of one. It’s just a year away.

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Imagine this: It’s September 2015. You are out for a walk down a lonely dirt road, and you fall into a well. Your phone breaks. No one can find you. Death beckons. Luckily, the water supply is fresh, and there’s a dry ledge to sleep. You discover the moss and algae lining the bricks of the well shaft are edible. Sometimes, you even catch a lizard. You survive for seven long years. Finally, you’re rescued! After receiving medical attention, showering, reuniting with loved ones, et cetera, you decide to watch television. “What is ‘Peacock’?” you ask, looking at a screen crowded with unfamiliar apps. “Is HBO Max like HBO Go? How does the Discovery channel have enough shows for a whole streaming service?” Everyone tells you to relax already and pick a show. So you choose Hulu’s new limited series The Dropout.

You only vaguely remember Theranos—something to do with blood?—and its young, blonde founder, Elizabeth Holmes, from magazine covers in your Pre-Well days. You watch Amanda Seyfried, her eyes widened, her voice lowered, her hair criminally frizzy, as she transforms from a dweeby but dedicated Stanford freshman to a wildly successful, wildly immoral fraudster peddling medical vaporware to the unsuspecting American masses. You are rapt. The acting is sensational. The plotting is thrilling. Your mind boggles at how Theranos unravelled. After you finish The Dropout, you post on Facebook, telling the world about what a great show you just watched. Barely anyone responds—people don’t check Facebook anymore?—but your aunt writes: “Eh. I already listened to the podcasts. And watched the documentary. And read the book.”

Book? Documentary? Podcasts? You soon discover that any story worth telling in 2022 is worth telling as many times as possible, in as many mediums as possible. Before watching The Dropout, people could read Bad Blood, the non-fiction book by reporter John Carreyrou documenting Theranos’ fall. Or they could listen to the podcast about Holmes, also titled The Dropout. Or they could watch the HBO documentary The Inventor. And this isn’t the end of Theranos content. There’s a feature film in pre-production starring Jennifer Lawrence, and an upcoming docuseries from Real World purveyors Bunim/Murray Productions.

Why make a series about a story everyone already knows? You’re confused, but you soon make another discovery: most of the stories apparently worth telling these days are a subgenre of true crime focused on scammers. In addition to The Dropout, you see Shonda Rhimes’ Inventing Anna on Netflix, which is about a wily Russian girl who called herself Anna Delvey conning her way into New York’s art idiot scene. Inventing Anna was adapted from a New York magazine article; there’s already a Vanity Fair piece and memoir about Delvey’s escapades published by a writer she tricked. Then there’s the BBC podcast “Fake Heiress.” On HBO Max, the docuseries Generation Hustle, which explores ten different modern scammers, also has an Anna Delvey episode.

Documentaries about con artists are enormously popular right now. Netflix has The Tinder Swindler, a documentary about an Israeli man who cons several Scandinavian women out of small fortunes, and The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman about a British man who essentially kidnaps college kids and a single mother by pretending to be a spy. It also just released Worst Roommate Ever, an anthology series featuring scammy roommates based on a New York magazine article. Amazon Prime has LulaRich, a docuseries about the multi-level marketing scheme LulaRoe. If you somehow run out of recent scam content, the dueling 2019 documentaries about incompetent party promoter Billy McFarland’s Fyre Festival, titled Fyre and Fyre Fraud, respectively, are still available on Hulu and Netflix.

And there’s more to come. Netflix is releasing a documentary about a scamming vegan called Bad Vegan later this month. When a dorky rapping entrepreneur named Heather Morgan was arrested with her boyfriend earlier this year in connection with laundering billions of dollars in Bitcoin, Hollywood announced three separate projects within a week of the arrest of the instantly-notorious “Crypto Couple.” As the crypto market continues its expansion, there will no doubt be many more outrageous stories about blockchain con artists scooped up and dumped into the crime-news-to-scam-TV pipeline soon enough.

Scam stories have flourished within the larger true-crime boom, and like true crime, they are usually ripped-from-the-headlines, reliant on pre-existing intellectual property. If they are dramatizations, they often feature stunt casting. In the case of both Inventing Anna and The Dropout, they provide the lead actress an opportunity to play a narcissist with a huge, idiosyncratic way of speaking, and notably bad hair. (This trend will continue with Apple’s forthcoming WeCrashed, where Jared Leto plays WeWork CEO Adam Neumann with a lank bob and Israeli accent, as well as The Thing About Pam, an NBC limited series starring a barely-recognizable Renée Zellweger as a Midwestern schemer. Both shows are based on other accounts of real-life events.) And their narratives hew to a well-worn rise-and-fall track: watch the person fool everyone, until suddenly they don’t.

True-crime stories are appealing, in part, as much for the perverse sense of comfort they can give their audiences as the vicarious thrills they offer. If you’re watching the crime, you can’t also be its victim. Consuming crime as entertainment, then, can feel like a prophylactic against disaster. In the same way, our appetite for scam stories reflects a cultural anxiety about becoming marks ourselves. In this age of grifters, the prevalence of stories examining how rip-offs happen gives us an opportunity to observe hoaxes unfold from a safe distance.

With so many streaming services jostling over so much content, leaning on this type of story makes business sense. Like a heist movie or a slasher flick, scam tales are a known quantity, and because they are based on already-successful projects in other formats, they’re a known quantity twice over. But this enthusiastic embrace of grifter tales has resulted in an oversaturation that makes it difficult for new entries to the Scam Show Canon to avoid a sense of staleness. Even The Dropout, by far the most accomplished new offering, has its dazzle dampened by this overfamiliarity. At some point, choosing to spend our finite time in this world watching the same story over and over raises a question: Who, exactly, is getting ripped off here?

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Apple surprised the tech world today by unveiling the M1 Ultra, its most powerful chip yet. Powering the new Mac Studio, the Ultra sits at the top of the stack ahead of the M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max.

Apple explained how using two separate processors on a motherboard is inefficient. With the M1 Ultra, the company fused together two M1 Max dies using a custom-build architecture, a technique that results in roughly double the performance. Apple calls this architecture “UltraFusion” and it connects with 2.5TB/s of interprocessor bandwidth between the two die while using less power than the alternative. Apple claims the chip, which has 114 billion transistors, is around 8x faster than M1.

This multi-die architecture supports memory speeds of up to 800GB/s, or more than 10 times the latest PC desktop chip, and can be paired with up to 128GB of unified RAM. As for the specs, this new hero chip has 20 cores comprised of 16 performance and 4 high-efficiency cores along with a 64-core GPU and 32-core Neural Engine for AI processing.

Apple made some eye-opening performance claims at its “peek performance” event. When compared to the fastest 16-core desktop PC chip, the M1 Ultra supposedly delivers 90% faster performance while using 100W less power. When it comes to graphics, Apple says it delivers faster speeds than the best discrete graphics cards around while using 200W less power. If accurate, those are some groundbreaking figures.

The M1 Ultra will debut in the Mac Studio, Apple’s new high-performance compact desktop, but will likely make its way to other premium products, like the Mac Pro or high-end iMac. We will hopefully receive a Mac Studio to review in the coming days or weeks (the computer launches on March 18), at which point, we will put this M1 Ultra to the test and compare it against the best from AMD and Intel.