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Parliamentary committee calls for an end to police facial recognition trials
The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has published a damning report saying that police trials of facial recognition “should be stopped and no further trials should take place until the right legal framework is in place” (The Register). The report criticises both failures to delete images of unconvicted individuals and raises concerns about inaccuracy and bias, but the Home Office says that it still supports ongoing experimentation with new technologies by police.
EU fines Qualcomm for forcing UK competitor out of the market
The European Union has fined US semiconductor firm Qualcomm €242 million (£217 million) for using its market dominance to drive UK rival Icera – now part of Nvidia – out of the 3G modem chip market between 2009 and 2011 (The Verge). An EU investigation found that Qualcomm – which occupied 60 per cent of the market at the time – sold its chips at below cost price to Huawei and ZTE with the intention of eliminating its competitor.
The Tiangong-2 space station is being deorbited
China's Tiangong-2 space station is scheduled to drop into the Pacific Ocean today (TechCrunch). The China National Space Administration (CNSA) says that the 18-metre-wide station and its solar array will burn up on reentry into the Earth's atmosphere, but that some debris may call “in a safe area in the South Pacific” near New Zealand.
Google Chrome will no longer give away when you're incognito
The next release of Google Chrome – version 76 – will close a loophole that sites such as paywalled online publications use to detect and block functionality to people accessing them in Incognito Mode, compromising the utility of such private browsing (Gizmodo). In a blog post Google explains that prior versions of Incognito Mode disabled the FileSystem API, making them detectable by the site that queried it.
Minecraft Earth has arrived in London
Mojang's Minecraft Earth has gone live for beta testers in London, who can now wander around the city building blocky additions to its architecture. IGN tried out the augmented reality game's building capabilities by adding a house to Tower Bridge.
The strange world of food portions
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