DawentsIT: All Things Technology news you need to know this Friday-
1.Google fired one of its top AI researchers. Timnit Gebru, a technical co-lead of Google’s ethical-artificial-intelligence team, said she was fired via email, and a source told Business Insider Google had been unhappy with a paper she’d written on the ethical dangers of language models.
2.Facebook is changing its “race-blind” hate-speech algorithm. Facebook’s proactive technology won’t automatically flag posts declaring, “Men are trash,” or “Americans are dumb” anymore, Facebook said.
3.Facebook will remove COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. “This is another way that we are applying our policy to remove misinformation about the virus that could lead to imminent physical harm,” Kang-Xing Jin, head of Facebook Health, said in a blog post.
4.The DOJ is suing Facebook for hiring foreign workers. The DOJ filed a lawsuit against Facebook on Thursday accusing the company of reserving over 2,600 high-paying jobs for foreign workers with temporary work visas instead of hiring US residents.
5.Hackers have been attacking the COVID-19 “cold chain.” IBM researchers said Thursday they’d detected a coordinated global phishing campaign targeting the COVID-19 vaccine refrigerated supply chain.
6.Four hundred lawmakers came after Jeff Bezos. In an open letter to Bezos 401 lawmakers from 34 countries said Amazon’s “days of impunity are over.”
7.Germany is buying more electric cars than California. Growth in the country has been fueled by aggressive subsidies of up to 9,000 euros per car.
8.The DOJ might let Huawei’s CFO go. The DOJ is in talks with Huawei discussing a potential deal to release CFO Meng Wanzhou if she admits wrongdoing, the Wall Street Journal reports.
9.YouTube will make you stop before you comment. The platform is adding a box that will ask users if they’re sure they want to leave a comment if it looks like that comment will be offensive.
10.Gousto is a pandemic unicorn. The meal kit delivery startup says it’s expecting it’s first profit and has doubled its monthly orders as locked down populations do more home cooking.
