Emoji jacket, petrol ban, BlackBerry death knell and more: best of the week’s news

Siobhan Doyle, assistant technology editor

Emoji jacket helps cyclists and drivers ‘share the road’

US automaker Ford has commissioned an ‘emoji jacket’ designed to enhance communication between cyclists and other road users on the go. The prototype jacket – created in partnership with industrial design specialists Designworks – uses emoji icons to display their mood to other drivers.

The back of the jacket features a large LED panel that allows the user to display their mood, i.e. whether they are happy, neutral or worried about travelling. Indicators and a hazard symbol can also be displayed by the cyclist to make other road users aware of the cyclist’s movements and possible dangers ahead.

Initially, this concept sounded pretty dumb to me, but looking into it further it may be more beneficial than I first thought. It’s a pretty neat invention, especially if most cyclists were to wear it in places as busy as London, for example.

According to experts, the human brain can process entire images that the eye sees for as little as 13 milliseconds. This is substantially faster than processing a word: approximately 250 milliseconds. Indeed, it may be better to have image-type signs such as emojis rather than words shown on the back of a jacket to allow for drivers to react quickly to certain situations involving a cyclist. The quicker an individual sees a sign, the less likely it is to be involved in an accident on the road. Indeed, that is the whole purpose of the jacket: to prevent loss of life on the roads.

Dickon Ross, editor in chief

UK to bring forward petrol and diesel ban by five years to 2035

The government’s target date of 2040 for ending sales of fossil-fuel cars has always seemed like a long way off, especially as car makers seemed more ambitious in electric, with new model announcements pouring in. The UK government’s decision to bring the date forward by five years is thus very welcome.

Several environmental factors are behind the new urgency. For global warming, electric vehicles are only as green as the energy they use, of course, and that depends on the grid’s generation mix. That mix is slowly but surely moving towards renewables. The other factor is local particulate pollution, which for Londoners is just as much of an environmental emergency.

All-electric traffic will bring an urban revolution akin to the end of horse power (the literal animal kind) a century ago. Note the ban is just for new sales – older models will still be on the road and when to retire those will be a complex economic and environmental calculation involving the emissions from manufacturing new models versus extending existing lifetimes, balanced against the differences in emissions per mile and much more. The all-electric (and human-powered) future is on its way. The automotive industry’s strategy and investment make it inevitable, with or without government targets. Targets help, though, because it focuses minds outside the car industry. There’s still a lot to be done regarding the EV charging infrastructure, for example.

Jonathan Wilson, online managing editor

Government considers bringing forward phase-out of coal by one year

One year doesn’t sound like much. It’s hardly the bombastic, big number, self-congratulatory kind of triumphant announcement I’ve come to expect from Johnson and his government. It wouldn’t look that impressive on the side of a bus, would it? I suppose that’s the difference between truth and lies. Still, it is at least a move in the right direction, as we slowly move away from fossil fuels. We could probably stop using coal altogether much sooner than this, given that the UK is already keeping the lights on for months at a time without burning a single hunk of coal. Perhaps there’ll be another triumphant announcement in due course.

Death knell for BlackBerry smartphones as manufacturer pulls out

Wait, what? I thought BlackBerry had given up the smartphone ghost long ago. Apparently, the BlackBerry brand has been limping on in recent years, eking out a meagre success off the back of its ‘CrackBerry’ legend. Well, no more. The company has officially ended its licensing deal with TCL, who will no longer produce smartphones bearing the BlackBerry name. At least until those must-have noughties handsets become suitably vintage-retro again later in this decade, at which point the company can resurrect its classic tippy-tappy physical keyboard designs and ride a wave of pointless nostalgia, much like Nokia and Motorola have done with some of their classic olde-worlde phone designs.

Scientists to dive into ‘midnight zone’ to study dark ocean

Image of the week for me (narrowly beating this legend). I was also drawn to the poetic lure of the ‘midnight zone’ in the headline. I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating the metaphysical midnight zone and there are parallels with the dark and mysterious depths of the Indian Ocean. Nobody knows exactly what’s down there, so the only way to find out is to explore.

Ben Heubl, associate editor

Internet giants reject controversial facial-recognition start-up

Aware of pressure from the public who make up their user base, social media giants are growing increasingly wary of indirectly providing law-enforcement agencies with an intelligence edge. The largest tech companies have demanded Clearview AI stop taking images of users off their platform, for example.

Privacy concerns and people making complaints are common. In the UK, the body to whom you should report your privacy concerns is the Information Commissioner’s Office.

We, as users, have to be vigilant. Issues and opaqueness of who tracks our data continue to pose a problem, even among those who want to help. One less prominent party to this is the Global Privacy Assembly. Its aim is to bring together groups of data protection and privacy commissioners to share knowledge and build strong cooperation.

The Global Privacy Assembly is fighting for “an environment in which privacy and data protection authorities around the world are able effectively to act to fulfil their mandates, both individually and in concert, through diffusion of knowledge and supportive connections”.

The hypocritical part is that this organisation may be not compliant with privacy rules. We checked whether the organisation tracks users without their consent after a source tipped us off.

When we ran a data-tracking scan on the group’s website – supported by Cybot, a Danish privacy and analytics company – we stumbled across something that might worry privacy commissioners. I was told that the website allows Twitter to track visitors without prior, informed consent. There would also be no mention of this in their privacy policy. In their defence, one expert told us, it is only on a single page this is happening via an embedded Twitter feed. However, they should ask for consent in order to be compliant with privacy rulings. Others I spoke to said that GPA’s tracking occurs because it loads the Twitter feed of its profile on the site and that it is “on various pages” if one looks around – “right side of the page, midway down, typically”.

Although small in scale, this could be a problem because of the relationship with the ICO. Global Privacy Assembly claims to have Elizabeth Denham CBE, the UK’s Information Commissioner at the Information Commissioner’s Office, on its executive committee. Even such a small breach should raise questions. The ICO also shares the same physical address with the Global Privacy Assembly. Not from me personally, but it is likely that the ICO may soon receive a complaint about this issue from a member of the public.

Dominic Lenton, managing editor

Stephen King takes ‘The Stand’ against Facebook

Stephen King is a writer I’ve stuck with through thick and thin since picking up his early work as a young horror fan in the 1970s. I’m the first to admit it hasn’t all been great, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got round to reading all his fiction eventually without ever packing a book in halfway through. That includes the zeitgeisty techno-fear stuff like ‘Cell’, whose premise – in this case, a virus-like electromagnetic blast which affects all mobile phone users – might have made a short story but struggles to sustain a whole novel.

Despite this level of fandom, I’ve never bothered joining the more than five million people who follow King on Facebook, so I only learned indirectly that – like Star Wars actor Mark Hamill – he’s decided to delete his account and interact with the public solely via Twitter. Both announced their Facebook decision publicly and both attributed them to that social media platform’s reluctance to address dishonesty in political advertising.

Should Mark Zuckerberg care? I wouldn’t imagine many users are going to cancel their own accounts just because writers or actors they’re interested in have switched allegiance. In fact, I doubt anyone chooses which platform they’re going to concentrate on based purely on the number of celebrities who are active on it. Who’d be more bothered about not getting updates from a writer or actor than they would about missing out on news from friends and family?

One thing I’ll confidently predict about this whole business, though, is that King has at least a germ of an idea about how he can work it into a story at some point in the future. And, from my own experience, that it’ll eventually be turned into a disappointing movie.

Siobhan Doyle, assistant technology editor

Emoji jacket helps cyclists and drivers ‘share the road’

US automaker Ford has commissioned an ‘emoji jacket’ designed to enhance communication between cyclists and other road users on the go. The prototype jacket – created in partnership with industrial design specialists Designworks – uses emoji icons to display their mood to other drivers.

The back of the jacket features a large LED panel that allows the user to display their mood, i.e. whether they are happy, neutral or worried about travelling. Indicators and a hazard symbol can also be displayed by the cyclist to make other road users aware of the cyclist’s movements and possible dangers ahead.

Initially, this concept sounded pretty dumb to me, but looking into it further it may be more beneficial than I first thought. It’s a pretty neat invention, especially if most cyclists were to wear it in places as busy as London, for example.

According to experts, the human brain can process entire images that the eye sees for as little as 13 milliseconds. This is substantially faster than processing a word: approximately 250 milliseconds. Indeed, it may be better to have image-type signs such as emojis rather than words shown on the back of a jacket to allow for drivers to react quickly to certain situations involving a cyclist. The quicker an individual sees a sign, the less likely it is to be involved in an accident on the road. Indeed, that is the whole purpose of the jacket: to prevent loss of life on the roads.

Dickon Ross, editor in chief

UK to bring forward petrol and diesel ban by five years to 2035

The government’s target date of 2040 for ending sales of fossil-fuel cars has always seemed like a long way off, especially as car makers seemed more ambitious in electric, with new model announcements pouring in. The UK government’s decision to bring the date forward by five years is thus very welcome.

Several environmental factors are behind the new urgency. For global warming, electric vehicles are only as green as the energy they use, of course, and that depends on the grid’s generation mix. That mix is slowly but surely moving towards renewables. The other factor is local particulate pollution, which for Londoners is just as much of an environmental emergency.

All-electric traffic will bring an urban revolution akin to the end of horse power (the literal animal kind) a century ago. Note the ban is just for new sales – older models will still be on the road and when to retire those will be a complex economic and environmental calculation involving the emissions from manufacturing new models versus extending existing lifetimes, balanced against the differences in emissions per mile and much more. The all-electric (and human-powered) future is on its way. The automotive industry’s strategy and investment make it inevitable, with or without government targets. Targets help, though, because it focuses minds outside the car industry. There’s still a lot to be done regarding the EV charging infrastructure, for example.

Jonathan Wilson, online managing editor

Government considers bringing forward phase-out of coal by one year

One year doesn’t sound like much. It’s hardly the bombastic, big number, self-congratulatory kind of triumphant announcement I’ve come to expect from Johnson and his government. It wouldn’t look that impressive on the side of a bus, would it? I suppose that’s the difference between truth and lies. Still, it is at least a move in the right direction, as we slowly move away from fossil fuels. We could probably stop using coal altogether much sooner than this, given that the UK is already keeping the lights on for months at a time without burning a single hunk of coal. Perhaps there’ll be another triumphant announcement in due course.

Death knell for BlackBerry smartphones as manufacturer pulls out

Wait, what? I thought BlackBerry had given up the smartphone ghost long ago. Apparently, the BlackBerry brand has been limping on in recent years, eking out a meagre success off the back of its ‘CrackBerry’ legend. Well, no more. The company has officially ended its licensing deal with TCL, who will no longer produce smartphones bearing the BlackBerry name. At least until those must-have noughties handsets become suitably vintage-retro again later in this decade, at which point the company can resurrect its classic tippy-tappy physical keyboard designs and ride a wave of pointless nostalgia, much like Nokia and Motorola have done with some of their classic olde-worlde phone designs.

Scientists to dive into ‘midnight zone’ to study dark ocean

Image of the week for me (narrowly beating this legend). I was also drawn to the poetic lure of the ‘midnight zone’ in the headline. I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating the metaphysical midnight zone and there are parallels with the dark and mysterious depths of the Indian Ocean. Nobody knows exactly what’s down there, so the only way to find out is to explore.

Ben Heubl, associate editor

Internet giants reject controversial facial-recognition start-up

Aware of pressure from the public who make up their user base, social media giants are growing increasingly wary of indirectly providing law-enforcement agencies with an intelligence edge. The largest tech companies have demanded Clearview AI stop taking images of users off their platform, for example.

Privacy concerns and people making complaints are common. In the UK, the body to whom you should report your privacy concerns is the Information Commissioner’s Office.

We, as users, have to be vigilant. Issues and opaqueness of who tracks our data continue to pose a problem, even among those who want to help. One less prominent party to this is the Global Privacy Assembly. Its aim is to bring together groups of data protection and privacy commissioners to share knowledge and build strong cooperation.

The Global Privacy Assembly is fighting for “an environment in which privacy and data protection authorities around the world are able effectively to act to fulfil their mandates, both individually and in concert, through diffusion of knowledge and supportive connections”.

The hypocritical part is that this organisation may be not compliant with privacy rules. We checked whether the organisation tracks users without their consent after a source tipped us off.

When we ran a data-tracking scan on the group’s website – supported by Cybot, a Danish privacy and analytics company – we stumbled across something that might worry privacy commissioners. I was told that the website allows Twitter to track visitors without prior, informed consent. There would also be no mention of this in their privacy policy. In their defence, one expert told us, it is only on a single page this is happening via an embedded Twitter feed. However, they should ask for consent in order to be compliant with privacy rulings. Others I spoke to said that GPA’s tracking occurs because it loads the Twitter feed of its profile on the site and that it is “on various pages” if one looks around – “right side of the page, midway down, typically”.

Although small in scale, this could be a problem because of the relationship with the ICO. Global Privacy Assembly claims to have Elizabeth Denham CBE, the UK’s Information Commissioner at the Information Commissioner’s Office, on its executive committee. Even such a small breach should raise questions. The ICO also shares the same physical address with the Global Privacy Assembly. Not from me personally, but it is likely that the ICO may soon receive a complaint about this issue from a member of the public.

Dominic Lenton, managing editor

Stephen King takes ‘The Stand’ against Facebook

Stephen King is a writer I’ve stuck with through thick and thin since picking up his early work as a young horror fan in the 1970s. I’m the first to admit it hasn’t all been great, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got round to reading all his fiction eventually without ever packing a book in halfway through. That includes the zeitgeisty techno-fear stuff like ‘Cell’, whose premise – in this case, a virus-like electromagnetic blast which affects all mobile phone users – might have made a short story but struggles to sustain a whole novel.

Despite this level of fandom, I’ve never bothered joining the more than five million people who follow King on Facebook, so I only learned indirectly that – like Star Wars actor Mark Hamill – he’s decided to delete his account and interact with the public solely via Twitter. Both announced their Facebook decision publicly and both attributed them to that social media platform’s reluctance to address dishonesty in political advertising.

Should Mark Zuckerberg care? I wouldn’t imagine many users are going to cancel their own accounts just because writers or actors they’re interested in have switched allegiance. In fact, I doubt anyone chooses which platform they’re going to concentrate on based purely on the number of celebrities who are active on it. Who’d be more bothered about not getting updates from a writer or actor than they would about missing out on news from friends and family?

One thing I’ll confidently predict about this whole business, though, is that King has at least a germ of an idea about how he can work it into a story at some point in the future. And, from my own experience, that it’ll eventually be turned into a disappointing movie.

E&T editorial staffhttps://eandt.theiet.org/rss

https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2020/02/best-of-the-weeks-news-070220/

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