The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) would like your opinion on how it should regulate facial recognition. The agency issued draft rules on 8 August with a one-month comment period. The rules follow several years of court battles over private companies’ widespread use of the technology: Public toilets and zoos have sparked debate and lawsuits over their use of facial-recognition technology.
However, the main driver of the tech so far may be public security forces, according to recent studies. And even under the new rules, security forces will not need permission to identify individuals with facial recognition. Indeed, while people may find it humorous or galling when a toilet paper dispenser requires facial recognition, a police force’s use of facial recognition to identify protestors and quell local protests is a more weighty and controversial matter.
TV broadcasters may have a new way to reach the cordless generation: 5G. In July, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted a six-month experimental license to a low-powertelevision network in Massachusetts to transmit video and other data one-way following the 5G protocol over a portion of the ultra high frequency (UHF) band via television towers.
If television broadcasters can meet some of consumers’ voracious demand for Internet video streaming using TV hardware and spectrum, it will free up some network bandwidth in spectrum previously used for two-way cellular signals and create new business opportunities. The FCC granted the SinclairBroadcasting Group a similar license in 2021, and Czech telecom CRA began broadcasting to mobile phones earlier this year as well.
Low-power television networks—which already target audiences that major broadcasters don’t—may be able to figure out how to make 5G work.
I recorded the Madrid end of an interview for Gastropod. The interview, with Stefanie Malan-Müller, is woven into the Gut Feeling episode: https://gastropod.com/gut-feeling
IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT in the Maltese search-and-rescue zone of the Mediterranean when a rubber boat originating from Libya carrying dozens of migrants encountered a hulking cargo ship from Madeira and a European military aircraft. The ship’s captain stopped the engines, and the aircraft flashed its lights at the rubber boat. But neither the ship nor the aircraft came to the rescue. Instead, Maltese authorities told the ship’s captain to wait for vessels from Malta to pick up the migrants. By the time those boats arrived, three migrants had drowned trying to swim to the idle ship.
