“We’re excited to share that AWS has acquired Wickr, an innovative company that has developed the industry’s most secure, end-to-end encrypted, communication technology,” Stephen Schmidt, Amazon Web Services’ vice president, wrote. With a nod to the company’s ever-deepening relationships with the military, and Washington in general, Schmidt added that Wickr’s features give “security conscious enterprises and government agencies the ability to implement important governance and security controls to help them meet their compliance requirements.” Schmidt himself has a background in this space: his LinkedIn profile notes he spent a decade at the FBI.

Wickr’s app — like secure messaging competitor Signal — has been popular with journalists and whistleblowers; it’s also been a go-to for criminals, Motherboard notes. It’s unclear if the proximity to the tech monolith will impact the app’s popularity for free users.

In Amazon’s case, Schmidt indicates the acquisition was at least partially influenced by the need to preserve information security while working remotely. “With the move to hybrid work environments, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprises and government agencies have a growing desire to protect their communications,” he wrote.

I think we should. If it is corrupt or makes mistakes, it will at least be correctable.

LONDON — A study has found that most Europeans would like to see some of their members of parliament replaced by algorithms.

Researchers at IE University’s Center for the Governance of Change asked 2769 people from 11 countries worldwide how they would feel about reducing the number of national parliamentarians in their country and giving those seats to an AI that would have access to their data.

The results, published Thursday, showed that despite AI’s clear and obvious limitations, 51% of Europeans said they were in favor of such a move.

AI, self-driving cars, robotics and more… all in one place.

Find out more about our upcoming Global Technology Governance Summit: https://wef.ch/2NJDej0 # GTGS21.

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World Economic Forum.

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AI, self-driving cars, robotics and more… all in one place.

Find out more about our upcoming Global Technology Governance Summit: #GT… See More.

The World Economic Forum is convening the first Global Technology Governance Summit on 6–7 April 2021. This virtual meeting, hosted by Japan, is organized in close collaboration with the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) Network.

The European Union has long been a trendsetter in privacy regulation. Its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and stringent antitrust laws have inspired new legislation around the world. For decades, the EU has codified protections on personal data and fought against what it viewed as commercial exploitation of private information, proudly positioning its regulations in contrast to the light-touch privacy policies in the United States.

The new European data governance strategy (pdf) takes a fundamentally different approach. With it, the EU will become an active player in facilitating the use and monetization of its citizens’ personal data. Unveiled by the European Commission in February 2020, the strategy outlines policy measures and investments to be rolled out in the next five years.

This new strategy represents a radical shift in the EU’s focus, from protecting individual privacy to promoting data sharing as a civic duty. Specifically, it will create a pan-European market for personal data through a mechanism called a data trust. A data trust is a steward that manages people’s data on their behalf and has fiduciary duties toward its clients.

Circa 2015

Imagine a blimp city floating 30 miles above the scorching surface of Venus – a home for a team of astronauts studying one of the solar system’s most inhospitable planets.

NASA is currently doing just that; floating a concept that could one day see a 30-day manned mission to Earth’s closest planetary neighbor.

Eventually, the mission could involve a permanent human presence suspended above the planet.

For the longest time, Google’s new Fuchsia operating system remained a bit of a mystery — with little information in terms of the company’s plans for it, even as the team behind it brought the code to GitHub under a standard open-source license. These days, we know that it’s Google’s first attempt at developing a completely new kernel and general purpose operating system that promises to be more than just an experiment (or a retention project to keep senior engineers from jumping ship). For the most part, though, Google has remained pretty mum about the subject.

It seems like Google is ready to start talking about Fuchsia a bit more now. The company today announced that it is expanding the Fuchsia open-source community and opening it up to contributions from the public. Typically, companies start opening up their open-source projects to outside contributors once they feel they have achieved a stable foundation that others can build on.

“Starting today, we are expanding Fuchsia ‘s open source model to make it easier for the public to engage with the project,” the team writes. “We have created new public mailing lists for project discussions, added a governance model to clarify how strategic decisions are made, and opened up the issue tracker for public contributors to see what’s being worked on. As an open source effort, we welcome high-quality, well-tested contributions from all. There is now a process to become a member to submit patches, or a committer with full write access.”

It’s been four years, and we still don’t really know what Google intends to do with this OS.

It’s been over four years since we first found out that Google is developing a new operating system called Fuchsia. It’s unique because it’s not based on a Linux kernel; instead, it uses a microkernel called Zircon. It’s also unique because, despite being developed “in the open” on publicly browsable repositories, nobody really understands what the OS is for, and Google executives have been remarkably coy about it all.

Today, that mix of trends continues as the company announces that it’s opening up a little more by asking for more public contributors from outside its organization. Google says it has “created new public mailing lists for project discussions, added a governance model to clarify how strategic decisions are made, and opened up the issue tracker for public contributors to see what’s being worked on.”

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a dive into the code and documentation Google has made available, though there are some early UI examples. Google’s post today emphasizes that “Fuchsia is not ready for general product development or as a development target,” but it’s likely that the announcement will spur another round of analysis.

A future man-made, self sufficient floating city to be called green floats or botanical cities is dreamt by Shimizu Corp., a Japanese firm working with State University of New York (SUNY) Polytechnic Institute.

Asia Green Buildings.

The next decade is going to be a transforming decade as many many technologies (some of which we all like to share in this group) are converging and maturing enough to rearrange our society in almost any aspect we can conceive.

I’m calling to those who are interested in creating and implementing an alternative model for the current social and governance systems, let’s build an open state that we can all support and trust regardless of our age, sex, geographical location, or belief system.

In the next 10 years, key technologies will converge to completely disrupt the five foundational sectors—information, energy, food, transportation, and materials—that underpin our global economy. We need to make sure the disruption benefits everyone.