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UCLA researchers have been awarded a $3.65 million grant to collect, contextualize, and digitally preserve a huge archive of materials relating to policing and mass incarceration. It should help historians and anthropologists, but more fundamentally it will thoroughly document a period that many would rather forget.
The “Archiving the Age of Mass incarceration” effort is being led by Kelly Lytle Hernandez, director of the university’s Bunche Center for African American Studies and creator of Million Dollar Hoods, another project documenting the human cost of incarceration in Los Angeles. The grant is provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
“We may be at a turning point in American history — may be building something new,” Lytle Hernandez told me, citing a tumultuous but potentially transformative 2020. “If that’s the case we want to make sure we are preserving the record of what happened. What we want to do is retain the records, the memory, the experiences of people affected by mass incarceration, and where possible the records of the state, which would otherwise be destroyed.”
The core of this collection will be a cache of documents released to Lytle Hernandez by the LAPD as part of this 2019 settlement (shortly after she won a MacArthur fellowship) regarding public disclosures and communication. She described it as around 177 boxes of paper records from the 1980s to the early 2000s detailing the “war on drugs,” policing immigrants, and many other topics, with more to be provided later under an agreement with the department.
The idea would be to “counterbalance” these official documents, as she put it, with documentation and testimony from the other side of the equation.
“People who are disproportionately incarcerated or arrested — we often lose our records because we get evicted; because where we stored our records, we can’t make the payments and they’re seized; they’re seized when we’re arrested, etc.,” she explained. “If we need to undo generations of harm, we need to know, where did that harm happen? Who did it happen to? I see this archival project as part of that dismantlement effort.”
Over the next few years Lytle Hernandez will lead the effort to assemble the archive, which will involve such traditional work as scanning and indexing paper documents, but also visiting communities and collecting “carceral ephemera” such as receipts for bail bonds (which may be the only surviving record of a person’s brush with the justice system) and personal stories and media.
Getting records from police and state agencies is a difficult and sometimes legally or politically fraught process. It’s important to get as much information as possible, from as many sources as possible, as quickly as possible, she said. Other major turning points in the history of racial justice have been inadequately documented, for reasons both negligent and deliberate.
“What if the nation had sent out squads of oral historians and students to capture and preserve the record? Imagine what we could know about enslavement and its toll on all of us, what it meant to the making of this country, if we had talked to the people who had experienced it — what kind of archive that would have left us, to grapple with and to help us move away from its legacies,” said Lytle Hernandez. “But we’ve been able to forget the power and legacy of slavery because we didn’t do a good enough job. Same with native removal, internment, immigration.”
Now there is an opportunity — around the country, she was careful to point out, not just in LA — to do just that with the era of mass incarceration. Not only that but they can bring modern techniques to bear in ways that weren’t possible during, say, the Civil Rights movement.
Her experience with Million Dollar Hood has shown her that there is serious interest in turning the tables among communities that have historically been disenfranchised or targeted by racist and classist policies propped up by bogus data.
“When we have a meeting we have black and brown students crammed into the room and out into the hall to learn data analysis and data science,” she said. “Part of the project is opening up that door. When you bring the people into the room who are the most impacted, they see that data differently — they see different stories.”
The archive will be completely public, though the exact scope of what documents will be included and how they will be sorted, described, and so on is still being worked out. Regardless of the exact details, the archive should prove invaluable to students, researchers, and a curious public over the coming decades as the changes Lytle Hernandez hopes for begin to get underway.
San Jose-based robotics company Fetch unveiled its latest robot this morning. The PalletTransport1500 is an autonomous bot designed specifically to replace forklift uses in warehouses. The systems, which are designed to pick up and delivery pallets, are capable of sporting payloads of up to 2,504 pounds.
The device joins a number of different robotic forklift solutions from various companies, including Toyota. Though Amazon’s own Kiva Systems-produced robots are likely still the best-known pallet moving robotics in the game.
The system was developed with Honeywell’s Intelligrated’s Momentum warehouse software. Fetch, of course, already offers a number of different warehouse robotic solutions, building out a kind of autonomous ecosystem. The company’s systems are notable for their relative flexibility over other full-scale solutions.
Per a press release, the new robot is designed to remove humans from the pallet-moving equation. Actions include,
Cross-docking: the AMR can transport pallets directly from inbound to outbound shipment areas. After pallets are unloaded from the truck, the AMR carries pallets routed from the inbound trailers/containers directly to the respective outbound shipping area location.
Returns: once inbound items are sorted based on product type or vendor, the AMR transports pallets to their appropriate return station (inventory, recycle, charity, etc.)
Warehouse transport: after received products are unloaded and palletized, the AMR moves inventory to storage locations based on business needs
This product category was no doubt one of its most highly demanded, given the fairly common occurance of forklift-related accidents. Per numbers from OSHA, “forklifts cause about 85 fatal accidents per year; 34,900 accidents result in serious injury; and 61,800 are classified as non-serious.” That’s a pretty big source of workplace accidents. The agency adds if you assign one accident per machine, that means somewhere in the neighborhood or 11% of U.S. forklifts are involved in an accident.
In addition to these concerns, COVID-19 related shutdowns have no doubt made the move toward automated fulfillment systems all the more compelling over the past year.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/28/fetchs-latest-warehouse-robot-is-designed-to-replace-forklifts/
Hundreds of Android apps, far more than previously disclosed, have sent granular user location data to X-Mode, a data broker known to sell location data to U.S. military contractors.
The apps include messaging apps, a free video and file converter, several dating sites, and religion and prayer apps — each accounting for tens of millions of downloads to date, according to new research.
Sean O’Brien, principal researcher at ExpressVPN Digital Security Lab, and Esther Onfroy, co-founder of the Defensive Lab Agency, found close to 200 Android apps that at some point over the past year contained X-Mode tracking code.
Some of the apps were still sending location data to X-Mode as recently as December when Apple and Google told developers to remove X-Mode from their apps or face a ban from the app stores.
But weeks after the ban took effect, one popular U.S. transit map app that had been installed hundreds of thousands of times was still downloadable from Google Play even though it was still sending location data to X-Mode.
The new research, now published, is believed to be the broadest review to date of apps that collaborate with X-Mode, one of dozens of companies in a multibillion-dollar industry that buys and sells access to the location data collected from ordinary phone apps, often for the purposes of serving targeted advertising.
But X-Mode has faced greater scrutiny for its connections to government work, amid fresh reports that U.S. intelligence bought access to commercial location data to search for Americans’ past movements without first obtaining a warrant.
X-Mode pays app developers to include its tracking code, known as a software development kit, or SDK, in exchange for collecting and handing over the user’s location data. Users opt-in to this tracking by accepting the app’s terms of use and privacy policies. But not all apps that use X-Mode disclose to their users that their location data may end up with the data broker or is sold to military contractors.
X-Mode’s ties to military contractors (and by extension the U.S. military) was first disclosed by Motherboard, which first reported that a popular prayer app with more than 98 million downloads worldwide sent granular movement data to X-Mode.
In November, Motherboard found that another previously unreported Muslim prayer app called Qibla Compass sent data to X-Mode. O’Brien’s findings corroborate that and also point to several more Muslim-focused apps as containing X-Mode. By conducting network traffic analysis, Motherboard verified that at least three of those apps did at some point send location data to X-Mode, although none of the versions currently on Google Play do so. You can read Motherboard’s full story here.
X-Mode’s chief executive Josh Anton told CNN last year that the data broker tracks 25 million devices in the U.S., and told Motherboard its SDK had been used in about 400 apps.
In a statement to TechCrunch, Anton said:
“The ban on X-Mode’s SDK has broader ecosystem implications considering X-Mode collected similar mobile app data as most advertising SDKs. Apple and Google have set the precedent that they can determine private enterprises’ ability to collect and use mobile app data even when a majority of our publishers had secondary consent for the collection and use of location data.
We’ve recently sent a letter to Apple and Google to understand how we can best resolve this issue together so that we can both continue to use location data to save lives and continue to power the tech communities’ ability to build location-based products. We believe it’s important to ensure that Apple and Google hold X-Mode to the same standard they hold upon themselves when it comes to the collection and use of location data.”
The researchers also published new endpoints that apps using X-Mode’s SDK are known to communicate with, which O’Brien said he hoped would help others discover which apps are sending — or have historically sent — users’ location data to X-Mode.
“We hope consumers can identify if they’re the target of one of these location trackers and, more importantly, demand that this spying end. We want researchers to build off of our findings in the public interest, helping to shine light on these threats to privacy, security, and rights,” said O’Brien.
TechCrunch analyzed the network traffic on about two-dozen of the most downloaded Android apps in the researchers’ findings to look for apps that were communicating with any of the known X-Mode endpoints, and confirmed that several of the apps were at some point sending location data to X-Mode.
We also used the endpoints identified by the researchers to look for other popular apps that may have communicated with X-Mode.
At least one app identified by TechCrunch slipped through Google’s app store ban.
New York Subway in Google Play., until it was removed by Google. (Image: TechCrunch)
New York Subway, a popular app for navigating the New York City subway system that has been downloaded 250,000 times, according to data provided by Sensor Tower, was still listed in Google Play as of this week. But the app, which had not been updated since the app store bans were implemented, was still sending location data to X-Mode.
As soon as the app loads, a splash screen immediately asks for the user’s consent to send data to X-Mode for ads, analytics and market research, but the app did not mention X-Mode’s government work.
Desoline, the Israel-based app maker, did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but removed references to X-Mode from its privacy policy a short while after we reached out. At the time of writing, the app has not returned to Google Play.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the company removed the app from Google Play.
Using the researchers’ list of apps, TechCrunch also found that previous versions of two highly popular apps, Moco and Video MP3 Converter, which account for more than 115 million downloads to date, are still sending user location data to X-Mode. That poses a privacy risk to users who install Android apps from outside Google Play, and those who are running older apps that are still sending data to X-Mode.
Neither app maker responded to a request for comment. Google would not say if it had removed any other apps for similar violations or what measures it would take, if any, to protect users running older app versions that are still sending location data to X-Mode.
None of the corresponding and namesake apps for Apple’s iOS that we tested appeared to communicate with X-Mode’s endpoints. When reached, Apple declined to say if it had blocked any apps after its ban went into effect.
Read more on TechCrunch
“The sensors in smartphones provide rich data that can be exploited to limit our movements, our free expression, and our autonomy,” said O’Brien. “Location spying poses a serious threat to human rights because it peers into the most sensitive aspects of our lives and who we associate with.”
The newly published research is likely to bring fresh scrutiny to how ordinary smartphone apps are harvesting and selling vast amounts of personal data on millions of Americans, often without the user’s explicit consent.
Several federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service and Homeland Security, are under investigation by government watchdogs for buying and using location data from various data brokers without first obtaining a warrant. Last week it emerged that intelligence analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency buy access to commercial databases of Americans’ location data.
Critics say the government is exploiting a loophole in a 2018 Supreme Court ruling, which stopped law enforcement from obtaining cell phone location data directly from the cell carriers without a warrant.
Now the government says it doesn’t believe it needs a warrant for what it can buy directly from brokers.
Sen. Ron Wyden, a vocal privacy critic whose office has been investigating the data broker industry, previously drafted legislation that would grant the Federal Trade Commission new powers to regulate and fine data brokers.
“Americans are sick of learning that their location data is being sold by data brokers to anyone with a credit card. Industry self-regulation clearly isn’t working — Congress needs to pass tough legislation, like my Mind Your Own Business Act, to give consumers effective tools to prevent their data being sold and to give the FTC the power to hold companies accountable when they violate Americans’ privacy,” said Wyden.
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Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/28/x-mode-location-google-apple-ban/
As we move deeper into a cloud-centric world, everything was supposed to get easier, but in truth there’s a lot of moving parts, and companies need help getting everything to work. This takes people with a particular set of skills to help clients with tasks like integrations, managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments and getting data where you need it.
Tecera, a new venture capital firm launching today wants to attack this problem by investing in companies that can act as helpers and consultants. In a world where venture capital tends to gravitate mostly towards software and hardware, this is a distinctly different investment thesis.
Chris Barbin, founder and CEO at Tecera knows quite a bit about this. He was one of the founders at Appirio, a consulting firm founded way back in 2006 when cloud computing as we know it today was just getting off the ground. His former company had the vision and the foresight to start a firm to help companies use new tools like Salesforce, Google, Workday and AWS. Wipro bought the company in 2016 for $500 million after it had raised over $117 million, according to Crunchbase data.
Barbin believes that today, the level of complexity has only increased, and there will be a growing need for what he calls this people power to make everything work, and that takes a specialized kind of investor. “There’s been a flurry of investment activity into professional services-based companies over the last couple of years, but there’s never been an investment firm that is exclusively focused on these types of businesses,” Barbin explained.
During the firm’s research phase, the founders identified key platform companies like Salesforce, Twilio, Snowflake, DataDog and Cloudflare, and they estimate that there are between 7500 and 10,000 consulting companies supporting companies like this. “The goal of the firm is to help create a kind of a powerhouse for those emerging [platforms], or a firm or two that actually has the collection of those [SaaS platforms] in their toolkit,” he said.
The company will be targeting established firms with revenue between $5 and $20 million with aspirations to grow into the hundreds of millions, and will be doling out investments of between $5 and 20 million of capital per bet.
The firm is just getting started, but plans to have 8 employees by mid-year. Barbin indicated at least one investment was already in the pipeline, but wasn’t ready to give details just yet.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/28/tecera-launches-with-225m-to-fund-cloud-consulting-firms/
