Hasta La Gadget!

Transporation startup Boom is one step closer to bringing back supersonic passenger flight. On Wednesday, the company announced plans to build a manufacturing facility at Piedmont Triad International Airport in North Carolina. Once complete, “The Overture Superfactory” will employ approximately 1,750 workers by 2030 and produce the company’s upcoming Overture supersonic jet, which Boom hopes will start flying passengers in 2029. Construction on the facility is expected to start later this year, with production to follow in 2024. The first jet will roll out in 2025 and then fly in 2026. 

The 400,000 square foot facility will eventually produce aircraft for carriers like Japan Airlines and United Airlines. In 2021, the latter announced it would purchase 15 Overture jets once the plane met its safety and operating requirements. The agreement includes an option for United to buy an additional 35 aircraft, for a total of 50 jets.

Boom claims Overture will revolutionize commercial aviation. It envisions the Mach 1.7 jet flying from San Francisco to Toyko in approximately six hours. On a modern jet plane, you can expect a flight like that to take about 11 hours. What’s more, Bloom claims Overture will be “net-zero carbon” aircraft thanks to its ability to fly on 100 percent sustainable aviation fuels.

The news is another major win for the state of North Carolina. At the end of December, Toyota announced it would build a $1.29 billion battery plant on the Greensboro-Randolph Megasite, a tract of land located in Randolph County. Once complete sometime in 2025, the facility will consist of four production lines capable of producing batteries for approximately 200,000 vehicles per year. 

<img width="1280" height="800" src="https://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/2022-bentley-flying-spur-hybrid-sunset-1280×800.jpg" class="webfeedsFeaturedVisual wp-post-image" alt="2022 Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid" loading="lazy" style="margin: auto;margin-bottom: 5px;max-width: 100%" data-attachment-id="709017" data-permalink="https://www.slashgear.com/bentley-five-in-five-ev-plan-detailed-as-luxe-goes-green-by-2030-26709012/2022-bentley-flying-spur-hybrid-sunset/" data-orig-file="https://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/2022-bentley-flying-spur-hybrid-sunset.jpg" data-orig-size="1440,900" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="2022-bentley-flying-spur-hybrid-sunset" data-image-description="" data-image-caption="

Bentley

” data-medium-file=”https://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/2022-bentley-flying-spur-hybrid-sunset-1152×720.jpg” data-large-file=”https://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/2022-bentley-flying-spur-hybrid-sunset-1280×800.jpg” />Bentley will launch a new electric model every year between 2025 and 2030, the luxury automaker has announced today, as it continues its Beyond 100 roadmap toward a fully-BEV range. Dubbed “five in five,” the strategy will see a rapid evolution of the Bentley line-up, adding a fifth model to the current portfolio. It’ll also mean an increase in workforce, … Continue reading

Schneider made history twice as the first woman to break $1 million in wins and the first trans person to qualify for the quiz show’s “Tournament of Champions.”

The CEO of ID.me, a service used by dozens of states to verify unemployment benefits claimants as well as several federal agencies, has walked back previous claims that the company does not use a more powerful method of facial recognition.

“ID.me uses a specific ‘1 to Many’ check on selfies tied to government programs targeted by organized crime to prevent prolific identity thieves and members of organized crime from stealing the identities of innocent victims en masse,” Blake Hall said in a statement. “This step is internal to ID.me and does not involve any external or government database.”

That contrasts with comments Hall made earlier this week. “Our 1:1 face match is comparable to taking a selfie to unlock a smartphone,” he said. “ID.me does not use 1:many facial recognition, which is more complex and problematic.”

The 1:many approach involves matching images against those in a database, whereas 1:1 is a case of ensuring someone matches their own photo. For 1:1 matching, ID.me compares a user’s selfie against a piece of government ID that they upload.

Privacy advocates have criticized both approaches. Research has indicated that some facial recognition systems struggle to identify people with darker skin tones, and concerns have been raised about the security risks of storing biometric data.

Hall said ID.me’s 1:many check “occurs once during enrollment, and exists to make sure a single attacker is not registering multiple identities. This step is not tied to identity verification. It does not block legitimate users from verifying their identity, nor is it used for any other purpose other than to prevent identity theft.”

He claimed data shows that dropping the 1:many check “would immediately lead to significant identity theft and organized crime. The 1:1 Face Match step is the only step used to verify identity as explained in our earlier reports.”

According to Cyberscoop, some ID.me workers expressed concern that the company’s public statements didn’t align with what it was actually doing. “We could disable the 1:many face search, but then lose a valuable fraud fighting tool. Or we could change our public stance on using 1:many face search,” an engineer is said to have posted to an ID.me Slack channel this week. “But it seems we can’t keep doing one thing and saying another as that’s bound to land us in hot water.”

“If companies and the government have to lie about facial recognition in an effort to avoid public scrutiny, they shouldn’t be using it,” Fight for the Future campaign director Caitlin Seeley George said in a statement. “We already know this company is willing to say anything in order to get more government contracts. The CEO of ID.me has been peddling erroneous numbers about unemployment benefit fraud, but the fact that the IRS knew about this discrepancy is a big problem. The only responsible thing for the IRS and any other state or federal agency using ID.me to do is to stop these contracts immediately.”

ID.me came back under the spotlight recently after cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs tried to set up an account, which will be required to log into the Internal Revenue Service’s online portal by this summer. Krebs ran into difficulties during the verification process, and ID.me placed him in a queue to join a video call with a live agent. The system gave Krebs an estimated wait time of three hours and 27 minutes.

Hall said ID.me works with 10 federal agencies, 30 states and 540 companies. Last year, some users reported having to wait months to receive their benefits after the system failed to verify their identity. In some cases, folks said they had no success with the video chat system either.

If there is one thing that is really holding NFTs back from exploding into the mainstream it would be the lack of support from major tech companies, but all of that is about to change very soon. This is because Reddit has confirmed that they are testing allowing users to display their NFTs in their profile pictures.

In a statement made to TechCrunch, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt said, “We’re always exploring ways to provide value for users and communities on Reddit. At the moment we’re testing the ability to use NFTs as profile pictures (avatars) and verify ownership. It’s a small, internal test and no decisions have been made about expanding or rolling out the capability.”

If this sounds familiar, it is because Twitter also recently announced that users who are subscribed to the Twitter Blue service will also be able to use NFTs in their profile pictures. It was also recently reported that Facebook and Instagram are exploring the use of NFTs as well in a similar way.

While NFTs are already pretty popular, having the support from more mainstream platforms like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, and so on would go a long way in introducing it to other people who might not have otherwise known about it, or who might be skeptical about it.

Reddit Is Now Testing Allowing NFTs In Profile Pictures

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