Hasta La Gadget!

Facial recognition may soon play a role in your child’s lunch. The Financial Timesreports that nine schools in the UK’s North Ayrshire will start taking payments for canteen (aka cafeteria) lunches by scanning students’ faces. The technology should help minimize touch during the pandemic, but is mainly meant to speed up transaction times. That could be important when you may have roughly 25 minutes to serve an entire school of hungry kids.

Both the schools and system installer CRB Cunningham argued the systems would address privacy and security concerns. CRB Cunningham noted its hardware wasn’t using live facial recognition (actively scanning crowds), and was checking against encrypted faceprint templates. Schools were already using fingerprint readers, too, so this was more of a shift in biometric technology than a brand new layer of security. There were also concerns about fraud using conventional PINs — facial recognition is theoretically safer. North Ayrshire’s council added that 97 percent of children or parents had offered consent.

That won’t satisfy some critics, though. Big Brother Watch and England’s Biometrics Commissioner both maintained that facial recognition was arbitrary. There was a concern that school rollouts might normalize face scanning and numb students to privacy concerns. If you grow up with this technology, you might not object when it crops up at airports or music festivals.

You might not see this spread to the US and other countries given mounting opposition. However, it’s safe to say many will be watching the UK school rollout to gauge both the viability of facial recognition and its real-world pitfalls.

Facebook is back with a response to the latest criticism of its platform, stating in a lengthy new statement that it has drastically reduced the amount of hate speech its users have seen over the past three quarters. The company focuses on the prevalence of hate speech, which it describes as content that users actually see, not the sum total … Continue reading

A federal health panel has recommended that J&J recipients receive a booster shot.

Tesla delivered its redesigned Tesla Model S interior in early 2021, and now Model X buyers are finally getting their turn. Electrek and TMC forum member Sunnyvaletree report that Tesla has started delivering the revised Model X to customers, holding at least one event to mark the occasion. As you might guess, this effectively drags the electric crossover into the modern era with a landscape touchscreen display up front, a smaller display in the back and overall interior quality improvements that are more befitting a nearly $94,000 vehicle.

The EVs at the event were six-seaters, although it’s not clear if that’s the only configuration shipping first. There appear to be Model X Plaid units driving near Tesla’s Fremont factory.

The deliveries are good news for buyers who’ve wanted the space and luxury of the Model X over the ‘frugal’ Model Y. However, they also underscore the effect of chip shortages on Tesla’s production. On top of the late arrivals for early adopters, new shoppers will face very lengthy delays. Order a Model X Plaid as of this writing and you’ll have to wait until July 2022; spring for the lower-cost Long Range variant and you’ll wait until September 2022. It could be a long, long while before you can simply buy the current Model X design and expect to receive it in a timely fashion.

It’s not rare for us to find details about unannounced vehicles or changes in existing vehicles from leaked order guides that arrive at dealerships. Recently an order guide for the 2022 Ford Mustang Mach-E was linked by a dealership, and it shows that the electric vehicle will get some updates buyers will appreciate. The most important update is increased battery … Continue reading