Hasta La Gadget!

The European Union’s strict General Data Protection Regulation offers great data protection to users and makes companies liable to penalties if they don’t comply or misuse consumer data. The United States doesn’t have similar legislation but that could change in the future. The draft of a federal privacy bill is expected to arrive by early next year. It could provide GDPR-like data protections to users in the country.

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal is working with Republican Jerry Moran on a bipartisan federal privacy bill. Reuters reports that the draft of this bill could be put up by early 2019. The subcommittee working on this bill met yesterday but reportedly did not reach a consensus on the draft language as yet.

The legislation that has been proposed would expand data protections for users in the United States. It would also allow the government to collect civil penalties from companies that don’t comply, misuse user data or don’t do enough to protect it from theft.

There has been a lot of talk about having such legislation in the United States after multiple high profile privacy breaches this year that exposed the data of millions of American users. Apple CEO Tim Cook is one of the most vocal advocates for GDPR-like regulations in the United States.

Draft Of A U.S. Federal Privacy Bill Could Arrive In 2019 , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Amazon today announced AWS DeepRacer, a fully autonomous 1/18th-scale race car that aims to help developers learn machine learning. Priced at $399 but currently offered for $249, the race car lets developers get hands-on — literally — with a machine learning technique called reinforcement learning (RL).

RL takes a different approach to training models than other machine learning techniques, Amazon explained.

It’s a type of machine learning that works when an “agent” is allowed to act on a trial-and-error basis within an interactive environment. It does so using feedback from those actions to learn over time in order to reach a predetermined goal or to maximize some type of score or reward.

This makes it different from other machine learning techniques — like Supervised Learning, for example — as it doesn’t require any labeled training data to get started, and it can make short-term decisions while optimizing for a long-term goal.

The new race car lets developers experiment with RL by learning through autonomous driving.

Developers first get started using a virtual car and tracks in a cloud-based 3D racing simulator, powered by AWS RoboMaker. Here, they can train an autonomous driving model against a collection of predefined race tracks included with the simulator, then evaluate them virtually or choose to download them to the real-world AWS DeepRacer car.

They can also opt to participate in the first AWS DeepRacer League at the re:Invent conference, where the car was announced. This event will take place over the next 24 hours in the AWS DeepRacer workshops and at the MGM Speedway and will involve using Amazon SageMaker, AWS RoboMaker and other AWS services.

There are six main tracks, each with a pit area, a hacker garage and two extra tracks developers can use for training and experimentation. There will also be a DJ.

The league will continue after the event, as well, with a series of live racing events starting in 2019 at AWS Global Summits worldwide. Virtual tournaments will also be hosted throughout the year, Amazon said, with the goal of winning the AWS DeepRacer 2019 Championship Cup at re:invent 2019.

As for the car’s hardware itself, it’s a 1/18th-scale, radio-controlled, four-wheel drive vehicle powered by an Intel Atom processor. The processor runs Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, ROS (Robot Operating System) and the Intel OpenVino computer vision toolkit.

The car also includes a 4 megapixel camera with 1080p resolution, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, multiple USB ports and battery power that will last for about two hours.

It’s available for sale on Amazon here.

Physicists have created atomic clocks so precise that they can measure deformations in spacetime itself, according to new research.

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The European Union’s strict General Data Protection Regulation offers great data protection to users and makes companies liable to penalties if they don’t comply or misuse consumer data. The United States doesn’t have similar legislation but that could change in the future. The draft of a federal privacy bill is expected to arrive by early next year. It could provide GDPR-like data protections to users in the country.

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal is working with Republican Jerry Moran on a bipartisan federal privacy bill. Reuters reports that the draft of this bill could be put up by early 2019. The subcommittee working on this bill met yesterday but reportedly did not reach a consensus on the draft language as yet.

The legislation that has been proposed would expand data protections for users in the United States. It would also allow the government to collect civil penalties from companies that don’t comply, misuse user data or don’t do enough to protect it from theft.

There has been a lot of talk about having such legislation in the United States after multiple high profile privacy breaches this year that exposed the data of millions of American users. Apple CEO Tim Cook is one of the most vocal advocates for GDPR-like regulations in the United States.

Draft Of A U.S. Federal Privacy Bill Could Arrive In 2019 , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Back in the day, all the game consoles used cartridges. We had to blow on those things regularly, or dust got in the connectors and things didn’t work correctly. Dutch tech site Techtastic is reporting on a supposed Sony patent application that hints the next console could ditch the discs used for games today and return to the cartridge format.

Filed in late 2017, the patent application’s illustrations appear to show a cartridge that combines elements of flash drives with old-school cartridges. A Sony exec previously stated that the company needed a link between a console for home and a handheld, and this format looks like it might do that job. Keep in mind that in our searches of the USPTO database, we can’t locate this listing, so it’s also quite possible that it’s a hoax.

Assuming this is real, it could mean that the PS5 has a portable gaming component like the Switch, or perhaps Sony is cooking up a refreshed PS Vita that will play the same games as your PS5 at home using the same media. Perhaps each of these cartridges will have all the storage needed to run the game you are buying without filling up your internal drive. This also fits in with rumors of a disc-less console future that we had assumed to mean downloads or streaming games only – but not everyone has the bandwidth or patience to download 10 GB of game data before they can play a game.

[via TechTastic via ComicBook]