Google has announced that its own Pixel Android phones will soon gain the power to measure users heart rate and respiratory rate. With the help of the Google Fit app, Pixel phones will measure breaths if users “place your head and upper torso in view of your phone’s front-facing camera and breathe normally.” Heart rates will be measured when users place a finger on the phones’ rear-facing camera lens….

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Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has admitted that the Android version of its COVID-19 contact-tracing app has not informed users of contact with virus carriers since September 2020. As Japan has recently experienced a third wave of infections, news of that failure is a significant error and embarrassment. The Ministry admitted to the problems in a Thursday update to the app’s web page. The Ministry’s account of…

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Hon Hai Precision Manufacturing – aka Foxconn – reported two sets of numbers this week: record revenue, and record birth-rate among staff. Revenue for January, we’re told, came in at just under US$18bn, an increase of 37 percent compared to January 2020. The results are unaudited so Foxconn hasn’t detailed what kept it busy. We can take a guess, though: Apple just reported strong iThing and Mac sales, and…

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Electronic voting machine maker Smartmatic has sued Fox News, three of its hosts, and two of Donald Trump’s loyalists – Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell – for an eye-popping $2.7bn in defamation damages over the false claims it stole the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden. The lawsuit, filed Thursday with the Supreme Court in New York, accused Trump’s personal lawyer Giuliani and ex-federal prosecutor Powell of spreading lies…

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The Alphabet Workers Union on Wednesday filed a labor complaint against Google contractor Modis, claiming that for the past six months the staffing firm has prevented workers from discussing wages and job conditions as allowed under US law. The complaint, filed with the US National Labor Relations Board by CWA Local 1400’s Alphabet Workers Union, alleges that Adecco Group subsidiary Modis, which provides staff for Google’s data centers, suspended…

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+Comment Amazon has installed AI cameras inside its delivery vans to nitpick its drivers for, we’re told, safety reasons. The e-commerce behemoth has been slammed in the past for using all sorts of technology to keep close tabs on its workers sorting and handling goods at its warehouses. Now, it wants to keep a constant eye on those who set foot outside its so-called fulfillment centers. In a seven-or-so-minute…

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A New Jersey appeals court has ruled that a man accused of murder is entitled to review proprietary genetic testing software to challenge evidence presented against him. Attorneys defending Corey Pickett, on trial for a fatal Jersey City shooting that occurred in 2017, have been trying to examine the source code of a software program called TrueAllele to assess its reliability. The software helped analyze a genetic sample from…

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Google has proposed a framework for discussing and addressing open-source security based on factors like verified identity, code review, and trusted builds, but its approach may be at odds with open-source culture. The security of open-source software is critical because of its wide adoption, from the Linux kernel on which most of the internet runs to little JavaScript libraries that get built into millions of web applications, sometimes via…

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Microsoft has pushed its Custom Neural Voice service to general availability, although you’ll have to ask the company nicely if you want to use the vaguely unsettling text-to-speech service. Unsettling, because unlike the usual text to speech we’ve come to know and love over the years, which require a substantial amount of data (10,000 lines or more, according to Microsoft) to sound fluent, Custom Neural Voice requires far less…

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