Techstrong News Recap – February 16, 2023
On Feb. 16, William Willis covered Google’s launch of a beta for its ad tracking and privacy overhaul, Google’s expansion of its “pre-bunking” misinformation campaign in Germany and the EU’s vote to ban new combustion engine vehicles by 2035. He also talked about the Amazon-owned self driving company Zoox that completed its first public road test. Finally, he previewed articles from Security Boulevard, Digital CxO and DevOps.com, which covered Oligo Security’s launch of a runtime application to detect and prioritize open source vulnerabilities, whether or not you are getting the most out of AI and Quali’s support for security scanning and Open Policy Agent software for its Torque automated infrastructure platform.
Transcript
Hi again, everyone here the headlines for February 16th. First up Google has announced the first Beta release of its privacy sandbox on Android as part of the company's efforts to enhance privacy and modify ad tracking on Android phones. The goal of the Privacy sandbox on Android is to create a new Benchmark for how advertisers and websites obtained information about users without breaching their privacy.
To achieve this privacy preserving apis will be employed to restrict user data being shared with third parties while still allowing personalized ads in eliminating cross app identifiers. Beta participants will have the ability to manage which personal interest adds can they can be targeted with and can opt out or back into the program at any time. The initiative intends to bring Android more in line with Apple's act tracking transparency feature for iOS.
Apple releases app tracking transparency feature back in 2020 in Google has been slow to release its own privacy feature. While on the subject of Google it is launching a new initiative in Germany to counter the harmful effects of online misinformation. The tech giant will be rolling out a video campaign that will appear as advertisements on platforms such as Facebook tiktok and YouTube which aims to teach people how to correctly identify false claims before encountering them a technique known as pre-bunking.
Prevunking involves educating people about the different methods used to create misleading claims such as fear-mongering in the emission of important contacts. This technique is gaining support among tech companies and researchers and it's similar initiative was introduced last year in Eastern Europe that seemed to support its success. The pilot prebanking campaign was seen by 38 million people across Poland the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
The new provoking campaign in Germany will focus on photos and videos. Specifically with the ability to present those evidence of something false. Zooming out more companies have begun to use pre-bunking as they look for ways to fight the ever-increasing amounts of disinformation.
In other news the European Parliament has approved new vehicle emission standards that would effectively ban the sale of combustion engine cars and vans in the EU by 2035. The new rules will require all cars and vans sold in the EU to emit zero CO2 emissions by the middle of the next decade. Where the rules still need formal endorsement by the Council of the EU and to be published in the U official Journal before it becoming law final approval is expected by March.
The rules will also include a reduction in car emissions by 55% by 2030 an exemptions for smaller manufacturers. The move is expected to make sustainable driving more affordable and accessible to everyone and to encourage Innovation and investment for car manufacturers to achieve the eu's goal to reduce emissions. This being said similar plans have been announced by other countries, including the UK and California who will both ban the sale of gas powered cars by 2035, too.
Next up zukes a self-driving vehicle company owned by Amazon conducted a public road test of its four-person Robo taxi with employees on board. The vehicle ran a mile long route between two zoox buildings in Foster City, California without the need for steering wheels or pedals. Zoox obtained the necessary approvals from California's Department of Motor Vehicles and completed testing on private roads before conducting the public road test.
The car itself has an interior featuring a carriage style design with two benches facing each other and it can travel up to 35 miles per hour. The company claims that its vehicle can navigate road to prevent collisions and that it plans on launching an employee only shuttle service based on the successful test. Additionally this test brings the company another step closer to making the vehicle available to the General Public.
On Security Boulevard, we have an article looking at oglio Securities launch of a runtime application that enables cybersecurity teams to detect and prioritize open source code vulnerabilities. There's been a lot of focus on open source code vulnerabilities recently based on how it is developed. So oglio security provides it level of observability needed to discover and contextualize these vulnerabilities.
To learn more go to Security Boulevard calm. A digital cxl we have an article that looks at whether or not you are fully utilizing artificial intelligence. AI has grown so much in the past few decades and can help companies do risk analyzes review posts on social media and invoice capturing.
Companies are finally starting to realize how powerful AI can be but not everyone is using it to its full potential. com. com.
We've an article that looks at qualities announcement that it added support for security scanning and open policy agent software for its torque automated infrastructure platform. Quality is stated that the overall goal is to implement scans and policies to ultimately reduce the number of misconfigurations when companies provision infrastructure as code. com.
And that's today's text wrong news recap.
