Kozminski Techblog

It seemed like a joke, when we first heard in August about Donald Trump wanting to ‘ban’ TikTok from the US market. But Donald Trump is obviously a man of his word and he managed to sign executive orders much faster than building the infamous wall on the border with Mexico. Although before those orders came in force, Tiktok’s lawyers have taken the orders to court.

On December 7, 2020, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia granted a nationwide preliminary injunction against the enforcement of Executive Order (E.O.) 13942, limited to the Secretary of Commerce’s Identification of Prohibited Transactions with TikTok/ByteDance. The court’s ruling is consistent with the nationwide preliminary injunction granted by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on October 30, 2020. The Department maintains that the E.O. is fully consistent with law and promotes legitimate national security interests. The Government will continue to comply with the injunctions and has taken immediate steps to do so, but intends to vigorously defend the E.O. and the Secretary’s implementation efforts from legal challenges.

US government appeals TikTok injunction by TechCrunch on Scribd

The above means, the U.S. government is appealing the TikTok ban, according to a new court filing. But this isn’t only about TikTok and Donald Trump. A huge moral question here is, if it’s alright that governments might have the right to ban apps. And what they can ban next? Apps, websites, currencies. Wait a minute…we heard this story before. China has been actively censoring the internet for many years and even managed to ban cryptocurrencies. And everything was just perfectly justified as ‘national threat’. But is this story going to repeat on our side of the globe?

The answer is ‘yes, no, we don’t know’ since there are plenty of rumors in the European Union about regulating cryptocurrencies – and the ones that won’t comply will be simply banned.

Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands have asked the European Commission to regulate asset-backed cryptocurrencies. This request advocates that stablecoins should not be allowed to operate in 27 European countries until regulatory challenges and risks have been addressed.

by Cryptobriefing

Will be see a similar action against those decisions? Shouldn’t internet be a free place? What is a national threat and what is a thoughtless ban?

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Recently, Boeing, Kratos Defense & Security have won a contracts on developing the “Skyborg” drones for the U.S. Military. According to Flight Global:“The initial UAVs are to be delivered no later than May 2021.” But what they really are?

Skyborg is meant to be a UAV (abbreviation for unmanned aerial vehicle: an aircraft that is operated from a distance, without a person being present on it), cheaply built one so it could be lost in combat in large numbers. Although by saying cheap, we are talking about a price between $2 million and $20 million per piece. But what is more interesting is that the drone is meant to be controlled via artificial intelligence, a system called Skyborg Autonomous Core System.

But can we trust AI with such responsibilities as controling the drone in combat, with the risk it might fail at what it does, potentionally harming innocent people? We still do not know for what exact purposes will Skyborg be used. “The aim of the Skyborg Vanguard programme is to integrate autonomous attritable unmanned air vehicle technology with open missions systems to enable manned-unmanned teaming,” says the USAF. “Skyborg will provide the foundation on which the air force can build an airborne autonomous best-of-breed system that adapts, orients and decides at machine speed for a wide variety of increasingly complex mission sets.”

Some words being said by USAF might sound terrifying and I don’t by any means support war, but as a fan of AI, I am curious what this project will bring. You can learn more about Skyborg at National Defense Magazine.

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Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and others are a standard, when it comes to having a meeting online. They have been regularly used by companies around the world in the past few years. But none of then expected how the year 2020 is going to turn the cards into their favor.

When the COVID-19 virus has appeared in China, no one would predict the spread and impact it would have on all of us around the world. But we have all quickly realized that it isn’t a regular flu and in the wink of an eye governments around the world started to impose restrictions affecting our daily lives. With that being said, closed businesses and schools had to switch to an online form of meetings and classes. As reported by yourmoney.com, this has caused a huge growth of Zoom users (by whooping 2,000%.)

We all surely know the feeling of having a class online – it’s definitely different than being at school and nowadays, we have to do it for several hours a day. Very often during those meetings we get confused, excited or express other feelings we would like to share with the other participants, but those platforms don’t really help us communicate. So is there room for improvement?

Headroom, a brand new startup is working on a platform that will change everything by bringing A.I. on board. No more struggling to get attention or having troubles with bad connection. Headroom will be able to handle all the tasks you need – like raising your hand and overall attention, note-taking and even making a transcription of the whole meeting and a smart automatically-generated summaries. This would mean that every participant would only have to focus on the key thing – communication with others.

As the market has grown during the past few months, there is surely a room for improvement and I can’t wait to see Headroom’s product, so can’t others. Techcrunch.com has reported that Headroom has managed to raise $5m dollars from several investors, including Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI venture fund).

You can learn more about Headroom on https://www.goheadroom.com.