
In the early days of the pandemic, as courts across the country shut down and people awaiting trial for criminal charges languished in jail, Iman Freeman got a phone call from a local attorney that stunned her.
At the time, Freeman’s nonprofit, the Baltimore Action Legal Team or BALT, was running a bail fund for people in the city who couldn’t afford to post bail on their own. But the attorney didn’t need help bailing his client out of jail. Instead, he told Fre

The first human patient has received an implant from brain-chip startup Neuralink on Sunday and is recovering well, the company’s billionaire founder Elon Musk said.
“Initial results show promising neuron spike detection,” Musk said in a post on the social media platform X on Monday.
Spikes are activity by neurons, which the National Institute of Health describes as cells that use electrical and chemical signals to send information around the

Face recognition technologies help identify and apprehend criminal suspects, enhance airport security, and streamline entrances to workplaces. As such, they’re some of the most useful and promising video surveillance applications available today.
The technology will become even more widespread as advancements in cloud computing and AI continue to enhance its accuracy and usability.
Despite its advantages, privacy concerns inevitably surround face recognition technol

If you ever installed a new app on your streaming device or smart TV, you may have run into this: Entering email addresses and passwords with your TV remote can be painful—especially for those secure passwords with lots of capital letters, numbers, and special characters.
App publishers know this as well, and many of them have been looking for easier ways to authenticate their users. One approach, known as rendezvous linking, asks people to visit the publisher’s websit

George Carlin’s comedy was both ahead of its time and timeless. Why else would we keep hearing about it more than 15 years after his death in 2008, at age 71?
The pantheon-level comic’s political philosophy, as expressed in a 2005 special, fueled a viral anti-Trump ad during the 2020 election. His material on abortion, from 1996, made the rounds a couple summers ago, after the Dobbs decision imperiled Americans’ right to choose. Now, Carlin’s words are sh

We’ve been here many times before: a new technology paradigm shift happens and brings on an urgency to familiarize ourselves with the skills necessary to not only be knowledgeable but proficient. It also divides people into two categories: those who embrace the new technology, and those who get left behind. Past technology innovations like mobile and the web happened over many years and most people were able to adapt to change, modernize their skills, and adjust to new patterns and eve

After two years of battling antitrust scrutiny on two continents, Amazon and iRobot have agreed to cancel the tech giant’s $1.9 billion acquisition of the robot vacuum company. In a joint statement today, the companies acknowledged they saw “no path to regulatory approval in the European Union.”
It’s the end of what became an increasingly icky deal for almost everyone involved. Regulators in Europe were expected to approve or deny the bid by February 14,

Earnings season is underway once more, and this week, the Big Tech companies move front and center.
The start of 2024 hasn’t brought a lot of favorable headlines to that industry, as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others have announced mass layoffs. In the first four weeks of the year, tech companies, led by the giants of the industry, have laid off some 25,000 employees. Now, investors want to know how the financials look.
Stock prices for The Magnificent Seven (Ap

The Biden administration will start implementing a new requirement for the developers of major artificial intelligence systems to disclose their safety test results to the government.
The White House AI Council is scheduled to meet Monday to review progress made on the executive order that President Joe Biden signed three months ago to manage the fast-evolving technology.
Chief among the 90-day goals from the order was a mandate under the Defe

The golden age of video streaming services is quickly coming to an end. It was an age where subscription fees were affordable, plans were sharable, and content was ad-free. But starting today, one of the last video streaming services that didn’t show advertisements to viewers is jumping on the ad bandwagon.
Subscribers to both the individual Amazon Prime Video streaming service and the Amazon Prime membership (which includes access to Prime Video) will now see ads served to t