France’s data privacy watchdog, the CNIL, has fined Amazon’s logistics subsidiary in France €32 million, or $35 million at today’s exchange rate.
Again, it’s worth pointing out that the CNIL is listing some data processing wrongdoings.
This isn’t a labor case, it’s a data processing case about illegitimate and excessive monitoring of the warehouse workers.
“As implemented, the processing is considered to be excessively intrusive.”According to the French regulator, Amazon uses this performance data to assess the overall performance of its warehouse workers on a weekly basis.
The company’s first argument is that Amazon isn’t the only company in the logistics industry using a connected warehouse management system.
I’ll never forget trying out an early version of the virtual reality treadmill in a hotel suite many E3s ago.
The system, which features a concave platform and slippery shoes, was clever enough to influence Ready Player One’s take on the space.
HoloTile — which recently made its YouTube debut at the end of a video honoring Disney Research fellow, Larry Smoot – is an extremely clever and honestly quite elegant solution to some of these issues.
“I can walk on this omni directional floor in any direction I want,” Smoot says in the video.
If it’s going to see the light of day, it seems likely that it will be as part of a Disney Parks VR experience.
Will AI automate human jobs, and — if so — which jobs and when?
“Like much of the recent research, we find significant potential for AI to automate tasks,” Thompson told TechCrunch in an email interview.
In conducting this study, the researchers surveyed workers to understand what an AI system would have to accomplish, task-wise, to fully replace their jobs.
maintaining an AI system) that didn’t exist before.
For AI researchers and developers, this work points to the importance of decreasing the costs of AI deployments and of increasing the scope of how they can be deployed.
Although Ripple has been around since 2012, it and the XRP Ledger are doubling down on its global payments journey.
At the same time, it’s also aiming to become the go-to enterprise infrastructure provider, the company’s president, Monica Long, said on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast.
Distinct from the Ripple network and protocol, the XRP Ledger is a decentralized public ledger with an open source code base that anyone can contribute to or use, Long said.
“Foreign exchange is pretty concentrated in terms of the players who actually have enough capital to provide liquidity for those transactions,” Long said.
“And so when you have a lot of concentration, you have a lack of competitiveness for the pricing.”
Apple’s response to being required to allow developers to lever payment options apart from its in-house system is drawing a bevy of negative commentary from tech folks.
And with good reason: Apple is offering little and demanding much, ensuring that it can continue to demand a massive cut of developer revenue.
The reduction in demands constitutes a full 3% reduction from its existing 30% fee charged to payments that occur inside of its App Store system.
Simply put, Apple is trying to offer developers what it has to, but with enough costs attached to make it economically unpalatable.
Eric Seufert of Heracles Capital, described Apple’s posture as “heads I win, tails you lose,” which feels pretty accurate.
Memphis-based Dextrous Robotics is calling it a day.
The news, noted by the Robot Report, was confirmed by the warehouse robotics firm’s CEO, Evan Drumwright, on LinkedIn.
Last year, Dextrous made headlines for its novel approach to truck unloading.
The titular dexterity (not to be confused with fellow truck unloading robot firm Dexterity AI) allows the system to approach boxes from a variety of vantage points and angles.
“We started Dextrous Robotics four years ago to organize our world with machines and focused on automating one of the most dangerous tasks in the industrialized world,” says Drumwright.
But don’t expect the EV maker to drop Android Auto or Apple CarPlay as a result.
GM, for instance, decided not to make the new 2024 Chevy Blazer EV compatible with Android Auto or Apple CarPlay.
Meanwhile, Android Auto and Apple CarPlay is a secondary interface that lies on top of an operating system.
Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are apps that runs on the user’s phone and wirelessly communicates with the vehicle’s infotainment system.
Automakers have been scrambling to achieve the so-called “software-defined vehicle” and have largely used Android Auto and Apple CarPlay as a stop gap.
A lot of this energy is output as heat, which needs to be cooled back down in data centers.
That’s the basic concept behind Hestiia, which takes a miner, puts it on a radiator on your wall, and uses the excess heat from mining for coins to heat your house.
The use of conductive layers and heat pipes ensures efficient heat transfer, making the most of the emanated warmth.
The dual-core heating system provides both convection and radiant heating, and the system is controlled via an app, which enables the user to set the desired temperature.
With data centers consuming vast amounts of electricity and producing heat that is often wasted, Hestiia’s approach offers a sustainable solution.
The latest deployment to the “EU Data Boundary for the Microsoft Cloud”, as it brands the infrastructure, kicked off in at the start of last year.
Efforts to understand where digital information is being processed and stored, and even to co-locate data in the same country/region as customers — aka data localization — can be important considerations under EU data protection laws.
“This means the EU Data Boundary now includes pseudonymized personal data.
It says the new resources can be accessed via the EU Data Boundary Trust Center webpage.
Another enhancement of the data localization offer her blog post flags is the deployment of virtual desktop infrastructure within the EU Data Boundary.
But a French startup is going further, allowing bivalves like clams, mussels, and oysters to act as all-natural water quality inspectors.
The company began as a research project some 15 years ago at the University of Bordeaux.
As largely stationary filter feeders, they are quite in tune with their surroundings, and their habits are affected by things like temperature, pollution, and so on.
The molluSCAN-eye system won’t replace traditional water monitoring, but as a living part of the water ecosystem, its health and the health of its surroundings are closely linked.
Quinault is hoping that municipalities and natural resource authorities will shell out for the tech as a totally natural, harmless, and low-touch way to watch their waterways.
