In This Creepy New Novel, the Toys Are Watching Us

Samanta Schweblin’s writing straddles the unsettling border between the real and the surreal. Her novel “Fever Dream” takes place in a hospital where a dying woman narrates episodes from her past to a strange young boy who is missing part of his soul. Her short story collection “Mouthful of Birds” features a woman who falls in love with a merman, an expectant mother who shrinks her fetus to the size of an almond and spits it out, and a teenage girl who devours live birds.Her latest novel, “Little Eyes,” may be her most unsettling work yet — and her most realistic. Its dystopian premise is eerily plausible: People around the world have become obsessed with robotic stuffed animals called kentukis, which are operated remotely by strangers who can move and see the toy’s surroundings but can’t communicate except through grunts and squeaks.The narrative unfolds in more than a dozen towns and cities around the world, with characters that include “dwellers” who inhabit the toys and the “keepers” who own them. A lonely Guatemalan boy operates a stuffed dragon in Norway and dreams of seeing snow. A Peruvian woman who inhabits a bunny in Germany becomes engrossed with the romantic life of her keeper. A Venezuelan girl who has been kidnapped by sex traffickers is rescued by a panda kentuki controlled by someone in Croatia. The relationships between the owners and their toys range from nurturing to manipulative to violent, raising questions about voyeurism, the limits of virtual connection and how technology is both infantilizing and empowering us.“There’s a lot of ambiguity in her writing, and she trusts the reader a lot,” Megan McDowell, who translated “Little Eyes” and Schweblin’s earlier works into English, said in a Skype interview. “She leads you where she wants you to go, and then she leaves you there.”Schweblin, 42, grew up in a middle-class family on the outskirts of Buenos Aires and has lived in Berlin since 2012. She has long been celebrated as one of the most innovative Spanish-language writers of her generation, ever since she published her award-winning debut collection nearly 20 years ago. Her books have been translated in 35 languages. But her work has only recently caught on with U.S. readers, beginning with the English translation in 2017 of “Fever Dream.” Since then, her global rise has been swift: “Fever Dream” was a finalist for the Booker International Prize and won the Shirley Jackson Award for best novella, and is being adapted into a film for Netflix; both “Mouthful of Birds” and “Little Eyes” were longlisted for the Booker International Prize.In an email interview, Schweblin discussed the avoidance of technology in literature, the surreal nature of her work and how she thinks quarantine is affecting us. A condensed and edited excerpt from the exchange, which McDowell translated, is below.Can you tell me about where you are right now and how the pandemic has affected your daily life?I’m in Lago Puelo, in the far south of Argentine Patagonia, a small and isolated town. I came here almost two months ago now to visit my mom for a few days, but the pandemic and obligatory quarantine trapped me, and I haven’t been able to get back to Berlin.The first days were tough. Life was telling me: You’re staying here, with your little carry-on suitcase and your two books for the plane, you’re staying here and you have no return date. But now the days pass quickly, and I feel ever more comfortable, strangely comfortable. I rented a ramshackle cabin from a neighbor where I go every day to write. On the way I pass cows, bulls, horses, packs of dogs that keep me company almost the whole way. I concentrate on work, I exercise, I practically don’t talk to anyone all day long. I’m almost ashamed to say it: I’m happy amid the storm.How did you come up with the concept of kentukis?From the intersection of some circumstances of my life two or three years ago: a lot of connection with other people through social networks and mobile devices, traveling a lot, practically jumping city to city, language to language and culture to culture. Also a disquiet, or curiosity, that I couldn’t manage to formulate to myself and that had to do, precisely, with the way literature was writing these worlds.I was reading contemporary literature, and I could feel how writers often avoided naming terms that by then absolutely belonged to our reality: “WhatsApp,” “Instagram,” even something as simple as the idea of a “cellphone.”I myself, in my own writing, found myself noticing this problem. Why does the incursion of these technological realities into more literary texts bother us so much? Or, for example, absolutely realistic and literary poetry that dares to include this new reality, but are then labeled as “tech-poetry” or “sci-fi” or “futurist”? I wondered, and I still wonder, what happens to us with technology that we incorporate it so easily into our everyday, but then we reject it in the space of fiction?As a writer, another question arose from all this, the question that I think finally freed the idea of the kentukis: How can we talk about technology without getting tangled up in technical terms? How can we talk about the problems that we, as users, have with technology, without letting technology play a starring role?Your work often features animals, and “Little Eyes” centers on machines that are part human, part stuffed animals. What effect were you aiming for with that combination?Animals, toys, robots, all have in common a strange moral force that they exercise over us. There’s something in those eyes, in the way we see ourselves reflected, that destabilizes us. The digital world is full of strangers, real people without faces or bodies. If we could see their facial expressions and gestures, would we behave the same way with them?Pets watch how we live, they know we’re real, and we like to be looked at and adored. But it also soothes us to know that an animal looks but doesn’t talk, adores but doesn’t offer an opinion.Something that makes the relationships between kentukis and their owners so uncomfortable is that the kentukis can’t speak. That reminded me of something I read about your childhood — that you stopped speaking for a year when you were 12 because you didn’t want to be misunderstood. I wondered how that experience shaped your approach to language and writing.How odd, I had never made that connection, but you’re absolutely right. The thing is, language has always made me uncomfortable. I feel language as something heavy, rigid, but above all, inexact. It’s so easy to open our mouths and say something we’d rather not have said, it’s so terrifying to finally name out loud this thing that wasn’t said and to see it transformed into something real.Clarice Lispector said, “The word is my dominion over the world.” That’s what I feel with the written word: While orality exposes me to all the noises and dangers of language, the written word stops the world and gives me all the time I need to say exactly what I want to say.At the moment, we’re all isolated but the world also feels more interconnected, because every person in every country is experiencing, to a degree, the same catastrophe. As an artist, how are you processing what’s happening right now? Do you think the world you created in “Little Eyes” will resonate with people who are now even more dependent on technology for connection?It’s strange, because it wasn’t intentional. In “Little Eyes,” the users connect without bodies, they’re there and at the same time they’re not. They can move freely around another person’s living, nip at their heels, and still not really be there.In this sense, the quarantine isn’t imposing something new. We’ll come out of it with new rules, which will normalize part of this world in which we are beings who are ever more surveilled, and where the physical presence of bodies almost seems threatening.What are you working on right now?I’ve been thinking about a new novel for a few months now, but I’m still in the stage of notes and preparation, and I still don’t fully see its form or tone. In part because of this coronavirus quarantine but also because of personal reasons, my life has taken a radical turn in these past three months. I feel dizzy, as I guess most people in the world are right now, and I foresee that something essential is changing in the way I look at everything. I guess it’s a process that we’re all going through. I feel myself floating when I’m surprised to see I don’t know where I stand, and my ideas about what fiction is and how it affects reality change day by day. Read the full article

Vallejo Official's Removal Is Sought After He Throws Cat During Zoom Meeting

The city Planning Commission meeting in Vallejo, Calif., last week followed the same humdrum pattern of so many municipal meetings: There was the Pledge of Allegiance and a roll call, followed by various reports.That posed the usual challenges: Commissioners with microphones muted when they were trying to be heard, some of them appearing half offscreen at times or talking over one another.But things took an unexpected turn about 2 hours and 24 minutes into the session after one of the commissioners, Chris Platzer, was asked if he had any comments after reviewing a project application.“Yes, this is the section where you can, Commissioner Platzer,” the commission’s chairman said.The cat meowed loudly again. “OK, first, I’d like to introduce my cat,” Mr. Platzer said, lifting it close to the camera and then, with two hands, tossing it off screen.The cat squeaked as it was being thrown, and a thud could be heard.One commissioner on the videoconference put his hands to his forehead and covered his eyes in response.The meeting concluded 26 minutes later, but that was hardly the end of it.Bob Sampayan, the mayor of Vallejo, which is about 30 miles north of San Francisco, and Robert McConnell, a City Council member and the liaison to the commission, have asked for the council to consider Mr. Platzer’s immediate removal at a meeting on Tuesday, a city spokeswoman, Christina Lee, said on Monday.“The city does not condone the behavior that Vallejo Planning Commissioner Chris Platzer exhibited during the April 20th Planning Commission meeting,” she said. “This type of behavior does not model the core values of the City of Vallejo.”After the planning meeting adjourned, Mr. Platzer was heard using expletives, she said, adding that the mayor and Mr. McConnell discussed his behavior immediately after the episode and called for his removal within 48 hours.Stephanie Bell, senior director of cruelty casework for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said the group was prepared to place the cat “in an understanding, loving home” if Mr. Platzer’s “lack of patience or understanding” made cat guardianship inappropriate.“The cats in our care rely on us for everything, including food, respect and affection, and no one should ever punish them for seeking our attention,” she said. “While cats are known for agility, this cat was thrown and could have slammed into furniture, the wall or the ground.”As of Monday morning, the city had not received a formal resignation from Mr. Platzer, Ms. Lee said; however, The Times-Herald of Vallejo reported on Saturday that it had received an email from him suggesting that he was stepping down.Mr. Platzer, who could not be reached on Monday, was appointed to the volunteer position in August 2016 and his term was set to expire in June.“I did not conduct myself in the Zoom meeting in a manner befitting of a planning commissioner and apologize for any harm I may have inflicted,” he wrote in the email, The Times-Herald reported. “I serve at the pleasure of the council and no longer have that trust and backing.”He added, “We are all living in uncertain times and I certainly, like many of you, am adjusting to a new normalcy.”The Zoom episode was one of the latest to surface as officials adjust to remote working. In Florida, a judge this month admonished lawyers for getting too lax in their dress during their videoconference court appearances. Read the full article

An Official’s Removal Is Sought After He Throws Cat During Zoom Meeting

The city Planning Commission meeting in Vallejo, Calif., last week followed the same humdrum pattern of so many municipal meetings: There was the Pledge of Allegiance and a roll call, followed by various reports.That posed the usual challenges: Commissioners with microphones muted when they were trying to be heard, some of them appearing half offscreen at times or talking over one another.But things took an unexpected turn about 2 hours and 24 minutes into the session after one of the commissioners, Chris Platzer, was asked if he had any comments after reviewing a project application.“Yes, this is the section where you can, Commissioner Platzer,” the commission’s chairman said.The cat meowed loudly again. “OK, first, I’d like to introduce my cat,” Mr. Platzer said, lifting it close to the camera and then, with two hands, tossing it off screen.The cat squeaked as it was being thrown, and a thud could be heard.One commissioner on the videoconference put his hands to his forehead and covered his eyes in response.The meeting concluded 26 minutes later, but that was hardly the end of it.Bob Sampayan, the mayor of Vallejo, which is about 30 miles north of San Francisco, and Robert McConnell, a City Council member and the liaison to the commission, have asked for the council to consider Mr. Platzer’s immediate removal at a meeting on Tuesday, a city spokeswoman, Christina Lee, said on Monday.“The city does not condone the behavior that Vallejo Planning Commissioner Chris Platzer exhibited during the April 20th Planning Commission meeting,” she said. “This type of behavior does not model the core values of the City of Vallejo.”After the planning meeting adjourned, Mr. Platzer was heard using expletives, she said, adding that the mayor and Mr. McConnell discussed his behavior immediately after the episode and called for his removal within 48 hours.Stephanie Bell, senior director of cruelty casework for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said the group was prepared to place the cat “in an understanding, loving home” if Mr. Platzer’s “lack of patience or understanding” made cat guardianship inappropriate.“The cats in our care rely on us for everything, including food, respect and affection, and no one should ever punish them for seeking our attention,” she said. “While cats are known for agility, this cat was thrown and could have slammed into furniture, the wall or the ground.”As of Monday morning, the city had not received a formal resignation from Mr. Platzer, Ms. Lee said; however, The Times-Herald of Vallejo reported on Saturday that it had received an email from him suggesting that he was stepping down.Mr. Platzer, who could not be reached on Monday, was appointed to the volunteer position in August 2016 and his term was set to expire in June.“I did not conduct myself in the Zoom meeting in a manner befitting of a planning commissioner and apologize for any harm I may have inflicted,” he wrote in the email, The Times-Herald reported. “I serve at the pleasure of the council and no longer have that trust and backing.”He added, “We are all living in uncertain times and I certainly, like many of you, am adjusting to a new normalcy.”The Zoom episode was one of the latest to surface as officials adjust to remote working. In Florida, a judge this month admonished lawyers for getting too lax in their dress during their videoconference court appearances. Read the full article

Australia’s Fire Season Ends, and Researchers Look to the Next One

“Nine times out of 10,” he said, manual analysts produce more accurate results than the model. Using their experience, analysts are able to incorporate the uncertainty inherent in fire behavior, something “the computer just isn’t able to grasp.” But where the computer model excels, Dr. Heemstra said, is in analyzing several fires at once and determining which one poses the greatest risk — and therefore which one manual analysts should focus on.Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, has developed computer software called Spark, which aims to improve upon Phoenix.Phoenix was built to predict fire behavior in forest and grass, Dr. Heemstra said, so for several other fuel types, like shrub land, “it’s a bit like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.” Spark, because it uses unique equations for each fuel type, is more intuitive and reliable. It could be “the next evolutionary step” in firefighting models, Dr. Heemstra said, and the NSW Rural Fire Service hopes to use it as early as the next fire season.Whereas fire behavior models like Phoenix and Spark help predict the spread of a fire, drone technology may be able to predict where fires are likely to start. For the moment, drones are used mainly to monitor grassland fires. Forest fires burn particularly hot, and are volatile, making them unsafe for drones to fly over or for anyone nearby to operate the devices.The wildfire conditions in Australia are sufficiently severe that they verge on otherworldly. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif., has been exploring, with the CSIRO, the possibility of testing artificial intelligence for drones, rovers and satellites — not yet developed but intended for future space exploration — on the fires. This software would need to withstand extreme conditions on other planets, like “hot temperatures, low visibility and turbulent winds,” said Natasha Stavros, a science system engineer at J.P.L., in an email.A November 2019 study by J.P.L.’s Blue Sky Thinktank, on which Dr. Stavros was an author, found that the fire-management technologies offering the highest return on investment were autonomous micro-aerial vehicles — small drones typically weighing less than a quarter of a pound — that would be able to navigate themselves through wildfires. Eventually, these drones would operate in autonomous groups or “swarms,” which could monitor wider areas. Their ability to communicate with one another and a distant control center could potentially be used in exploring other planets. Read the full article

True Tales of Quarantined Socializing

Digital dance raves. Streaming soundbaths. Book readings by phone. Now we’ve gotta get creative. Read the full article

Get the Most Out of Your Fancy Smartphone Camera

It’s getting harder to take a truly bad photo on a good smartphone. Thanks to better lenses, robust processors and integrated computational photography software to process images under the hood, even scenes in low-light, no-flash situations that used to be hopelessly murky can now turn out nicely.Your phone’s native camera app makes it simple to grab a picture with just a couple of taps. But if you’ve recently upgraded your device and want to dive deeper into the latest hardware and software, here are a few tips — illustrated by two current models, Apple’s iPhone 11 Pro Max and Google’s Pixel 4 XL.

Zooming Around

Each member of the iPhone 11 family has at least two cameras for ultrawide and wide shots, but the iPhone 11 Pro line adds a third telephoto lens. To quickly jump between the cameras in Photo mode, tap the screen and select the .5x (ultrawide), 1x (wide) or 2x (telephoto) buttons. To zoom up to 10x, pinch the screen or press a zoom option and slide your finger on the dial that appears.The Pixel 4 has a telephoto lens in addition to its main 1x camera. Tap the screen twice to jump right to the 2x zoom. For manual zoom, tap the screen and move the slider. The Pixel 4 can zoom digitally up to 8x. Although the image typically loses some quality the higher you push it, Google’s Super Res Zoom technology works to enhance the look of the photo.

Shooting in Dark Times

On the iPhone 11 line, the Night mode activates when the Camera app is open in low light and on the standard 1x zoom setting. A small crescent moon icon appears on the screen showing the capture time calculated to pull in enough light for the image. To override Night mode’s math, tap the moon icon and use the on-screen slider to adjust the capture time. Not fidgeting is important, so consider a tripod for long exposure times in dark environments.Along with the Night mode, iPhone 11 models running at least iOS 13.2 have Deep Fusion, Apple’s machine-learning technology that snags nine versions of a shot in low to medium light and blends the best parts together into one detailed photo. Deep Fusion kicks in automatically, as long as you are not using the ultrawide-angle lens and not shooting in burst mode. The Camera app’s Photos Capture Outside the Frame setting needs to be disabled as well.Google has its own low-light setting, Night Sight. To use it on a Pixel 4, open the Camera app and select the Night Sight mode. The shutter button then shows a moon icon. Tap the moon and a circular timer appears, instructing you to hold still while the camera is capturing the image.Google’s Night Sight mode includes an Astrophotography feature to capture long exposures of the night sky; it works best away from places with light pollution, like large cities. To use the phone for shooting stars, make sure you are in Night Sight mode and have the device secured in a tripod or on a stable surface. When the “Astrophotography on” message appears, tap the moon icon and wait until the onscreen timer is finished.

Fine-Tuning Portraits

For the past few years, many smartphones have included a “portrait” mode that keeps the person, pet or object in the foreground in sharp focus while gently blurring the background.To use that mode on an iPhone 11, open the Camera app and select Portrait. On-screen instructions guide you on framing the shot, and you can apply lighting effects from the pop-up Portrait mode menu — before or after you’ve snapped the photo. To adjust background blur on a portrait in your camera roll, open the image, tap the Depth Control button (f) at the top of the screen and adjust the slider that appears below.Google also made improvements to the Portrait mode on its Pixel 4 phones, which now have two cameras working the shot instead of just one. To use it, open the Camera app and select Portrait. If you want to further edit a finished portrait, open the image, tap the Edit icon and adjust the sliders for light, color and blur.

Digging Deeper

No matter which phone you have, be sure to explore all its camera menus, image-editing tools and settings for optional features like compositional aids and shortcuts.The phone itself may offer tips onscreen, but the online help guides for the iPhone 11 and the Pixel 4 also have plenty of information to share for those wanting to get the most out of mobile photography. Read the full article

Cloud Computing Is Not the Energy Hog That Had Been Feared

The computer engine rooms that power the digital economy have become surprisingly energy efficient.A new study of data centers globally found that while their computing output jumped sixfold from 2010 to 2018, their energy consumption rose only 6 percent. The scientists’ findings suggest concerns that the rise of mammoth data centers would generate a surge in electricity demand and pollution have been greatly overstated.The major force behind the improving efficiency is the shift to cloud computing. In the cloud model, businesses and individuals consume computing over the internet as services, from raw calculation and data storage to search and social networks.The largest cloud data centers, sometimes the size of football fields, are owned and operated by big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook.Each of these sprawling digital factories, housing hundreds of thousands of computers, rack upon rack, is an energy-hungry behemoth. Some have been built near the Arctic for natural cooling and others beside huge hydroelectric plants in the Pacific Northwest.Still, they are the standard setters in terms of the amount of electricity needed for a computing task. “The public thinks these massive data centers are energy bad guys,” said Eric Masanet, the lead author of the study. “But those data centers are the most efficient in the world.”The study findings were published on Thursday in an article in the journal Science. It was a collaboration of five scientists at Northwestern University, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and an independent research firm. The project was funded by the Department of Energy and by a grant from a Northwestern alumnus who is an environmental philanthropistThe new research is a stark contrast to often-cited predictions that energy consumption in the world’s data centers is on a runaway path, perhaps set to triple or more over the next decade. Those worrying projections, the study authors say, are simplistic extrapolations and what-if scenarios that focus mainly on the rising demand for data center computing.By contrast, the new research is a bottom-up analysis that compiles information on data center processors, storage, software, networking and cooling from a range of sources to estimate actual electricity use. Enormous efficiency improvements, they conclude, have allowed computing output to increase sharply while power consumption has been essentially flat.“We’re hopeful that this research will reset people’s intuitions about data centers and energy use,” said Jonathan Koomey, a former scientist at the Berkeley lab who is an independent researcher.Over the years, data center electricity consumption has been a story of economic incentives and technology advances combining to tackle a problem.From 2000 to 2005, energy use in computer centers doubled. In 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency forecast another doubling of power consumed by data centers from 2005 to 2010.In 2011, at the request of The New York Times, Mr. Koomey made an assessment of how much data center electricity consumption actually did increase between 2005 and 2010. He estimated the global increase at 56 percent, far less than previously expected. The recession after the 2008 financial crisis played a role, but so did gains in efficiency. The new study, with added data, lowered that 2005 to 2010 estimate further.But the big improvements have come in recent years. Since 2010, the study authors write in Science, “the data center landscape has changed dramatically.”The tectonic shift has been to the cloud. In 2010, the researchers estimated that 79 percent of data center computing was done in smaller traditional computer centers, largely owned and run by non-tech companies. By 2018, 89 percent of data center computing took place in larger, utility-style cloud data centers.The big cloud data centers use tailored chips, high-density storage, so-called virtual-machine software, ultrafast networking and customized airflow systems — all to increase computing firepower with the least electricity.“The big tech companies eke out every bit of efficiency for every dollar they spend,” said Mr. Masanet, who left Northwestern last month to join the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara.Google is at the forefront. Its data centers on average generate seven times more computing power than they did just five years ago, using no more electricity, according to Urs Hölzle, a senior vice president who oversees Google’s data center technology.In 2018, data centers consumed about 1 percent of the world’s electricity output. That is the energy-consumption equivalent of 17 million American households, a sizable amount of energy use — but barely growing.The trend of efficiency gains largely offsetting rising demand should hold for three or four years, the researchers conclude. But beyond a few years, they say, the outlook is uncertain.In the Science article, they recommend steps including more investment in energy-saving research and improved measurement and information sharing by data center operators worldwide.The next few years, they write, will be “a critical transition phase to ensure a low-carbon and energy-efficient future.” Read the full article

Judge Halts Work on Microsoft’s JEDI Contract, a Victory for Amazon

A federal judge in Washington ordered Microsoft on Thursday to halt all work on a $10 billion cloud-computing contract for the Pentagon, in a victory for Amazon, which had challenged the awarding of the contract.In a sealed opinion, the judge, Patricia E. Campbell-Smith of the Court of Federal Claims, ordered work to stop on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, known as JEDI, until Amazon’s legal challenge was resolved. The 10-year contract was one of the largest tech contracts from the Pentagon, and Microsoft was set to begin work on it this month.The decision adds to the acrimony surrounding the lucrative deal, which was a major prize in the technology industry, and ratchets up the legal battle around the transformation of the military’s cloud-computing systems. Amazon had been seen as a front-runner to win the JEDI contract, but the Department of Defense awarded it to Microsoft in October.Amazon protested and said the process had been unfair. The internet giant claimed that President Trump had interfered in the bidding for the contract because of his feud with Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive and owner of The Washington Post. The Post has aggressively covered the Trump administration, and the president has referred to the newspaper as the “Amazon Washington Post” and accused it of spreading “fake news.”“This is all setting the stage for a major court fight between Amazon and Microsoft, with the D.O.D. caught in between,” said Daniel Ives, an analyst for Wedbush Securities who has been tracking the JEDI contract. “It’s a political football that’s being kicked around.”Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s vice president of communications, said in a statement on Thursday that the company was “disappointed with the additional delay” but that it believed “we will ultimately be able to move forward with the work to make sure those who serve our country can access the new technology they urgently require.”“We believe the facts will show they ran a detailed, thorough and fair process in determining the needs of the warfighter were best met by Microsoft,” he added.Lt. Col. Robert Carver, a Pentagon spokesman, said it was disappointed by the decision, which has “unnecessarily delayed implementing D.O.D.’s modernization strategy and deprived our warfighters of a set of capabilities they urgently need.” He added that the Defense Department was “confident in our award.”Amazon did not return a request for comment.When Microsoft was awarded the contract, the Defense Department was explicit that the bidding process had been correctly executed. “The acquisition process was conducted in accordance with applicable laws and regulations,” it said at the time. “All offerors were treated fairly and evaluated consistently with the solicitation’s stated evaluation criteria.”In public, Mr. Trump has said there were other “great companies” that should have a chance at the contract. But a speechwriter for former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in a recent book that Mr. Trump had wanted to foil Amazon and give the contract to another company.In December, Amazon filed its legal challenge against the awarding of JEDI, saying that Mr. Trump used “improper pressure” on the Pentagon at its expense. The company also argued that its cloud-computing services were superior to Microsoft’s and that it was better situated to fulfill the contract’s technical requirements.Since then, Amazon has escalated the battle. The company asked the court this week to let it depose Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Amazon argued that hearing from them was crucial to determine if they had intervened against it in the contract. Mr. Esper had recused himself from the contract award decision in October, citing his son’s employment at IBM, one of the early bidders on the JEDI contract.“The question is whether the president of the United States should be allowed to use the budget of the D.O.D. to pursue his own personal and political ends,” an Amazon spokesman said at the time.The Pentagon said it was strongly opposed to Amazon’s deposition request. Microsoft said Amazon “only provided the speculation of bias, with nothing approaching the ‘hard facts’ necessary” to demand them.In another court filing this month, Amazon argued that an injunction was necessary to prevent it from losing the profit it could earn from the contract.JEDI “will transform D.O.D.’s cloud architecture and define enterprise cloud for years to come,” wrote Kevin Mullen, an attorney representing Amazon in the case.The JEDI contract has also been in the spotlight because it is viewed as crucial to the Pentagon’s efforts to modernize its technology. Much of the military operates on computer systems from the 1980s and ’90s, and the Defense Department has spent billions of dollars trying to make them talk to one another.Mr. Ives, the analyst, has said that landing the JEDI contract put Microsoft in a position to earn the roughly $40 billion that the federal government is expected to spend on cloud computing over the next several years.On Thursday, Judge Campbell-Smith also required that Amazon pay a $42 million deposit that the court will hold in case it later determines that the injunction was wrongfully issued and that Microsoft is owed damages. Amazon must submit a plan for offering the money to the court by next Thursday, and it must agree to redactions to the judge’s order no later than Feb. 27 so that it can be made public.The preliminary injunction was a “prudent decision” given the complexities of the deal and the monetary stakes, Mr. Ives said, and the $42 million demanded from Amazon would not be a burden for the company.“It’s less than a rounding error relative to their treasure chest,” he said. He added that he expected Microsoft to prevail in the deal.Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting. Read the full article

Her Blog Post About Uber Upended Big Tech. Now She’s Written a Memoir.

WHISTLEBLOWER My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber By Susan Fowler In December 2015, Susan Fowler was settling into a new job as a software engineer at the technology-transportation company Uber when her boss sent her a series of disturbing chat messages. After asking how her work was going, Fowler’s manager, “Jake,” began complaining about inequities in his relationship with his girlfriend. “It is an open relationship, but it’s a little more open on vacations haha,” he wrote, to Fowler’s bewilderment. “She can go and have sex any day of the week. … It takes a herculean effort for me to do the same.” It became clear to Fowler that Jake was propositioning her. She saved screenshots of the conversation and sent them to Uber’s human resources department so that he could be appropriately sanctioned. Instead, they told her that Jake was a “high performer,” and that it was his first offense, so they “didn’t feel comfortable giving him anything more than a stern talking-to.” It was up to Fowler to move to a different team within the company to get away from him. Both the inappropriate comments and the company brushoff are the kinds of experiences that women at all levels of the income spectrum have come to accept as inherent to the professional world. Rather than quietly tolerate it, though, Fowler, who was 25 at the time, decided to make a fuss. What happened next received abundant news coverage: In 2017, Fowler published a blog post describing the harassment she experienced at Uber, including multiple incidents of discrimination and corporate bullying. The post went viral and the company started an investigation. Suddenly Uber, one of the fastest growing and most valuable companies in Silicon Valley, found itself at the center of several ethical and legal scandals, culminating in the departure of the company’s co-founder and C.E.O., Travis Kalanick. Image

Fowler’s revelations came eight months before The New York Times and The New Yorker published explosive allegations about Harvey Weinstein’s serial abuse of women, and helped catalyze the #MeToo movement. What is less well known is the remarkable back story that came before Fowler found herself at the center of these newsworthy events. “I wasn’t supposed to be a software engineer,” she writes in “Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber,” her sharp and engrossing memoir. “I wasn’t supposed to be a writer, or a whistle-blower, or even a college graduate, for that matter. If, 10 years ago, you had told me that I would someday be all of those things — if you had shown me where life would take me, and the very public role I would end up playing in the world — I wouldn’t have believed you.” Read the full article

SoftBank Takes Another Multibillion-Dollar Hit From Bad Bets

SoftBank Group has taken another multibillion-dollar hit from its ambitious but costly bets on once high-flying companies like Uber and WeWork, putting growing pressure on the Japanese conglomerate to get its financial house in order.The company, which has used its $100 billion Vision Fund to dominate the world of technology investment, has become a target for hedge fund giant Elliott Management, which has been urging changes at the Japanese firm, including governance overhauls and stock buybacks.On Wednesday, SoftBank may have given Elliott another reason to complain. It said the Vision Fund and other investments cost its bottom line 225.1 billion yen, or about $2 billion, in the final three months of last year.Overall, SoftBank reported a profit of about $501 million for the quarter, well short of what investors had expected. Its profit was less than one-tenth of what it had posted one year earlier. Its operating profit fell 99 percent.In November, SoftBank said it had lost $4.6 billion on its investment in WeWork, the office space tech company whose initial public offering imploded spectacularly last fall after the revelation of serious governance issues, including allegations of self-dealing by the company’s chief executive.The results came one day after a judge in the United States approved a merger between Sprint, which SoftBank controls, and T-Mobile, another American wireless carrier. Read the full article

Foldable Phones Are Here. Do We Really Want Them?

To make gadgets bend, you have to sacrifice some hardness. The flexible displays of foldables are generally covered by a plastic layer, which can be scratched up or penetrated more easily than the tough glass protecting traditional phone displays. (Samsung said its Z Flip uses an ultrathin, foldable glass that would let you fold and unfold your phone 200,000 times.)“If you take a ballpoint pen and you push really hard on the iPhone screen, it’ll be fine,” said Kyle Wiens, the chief executive of iFixit, a company that provides instructions and parts to repair gadgets. “If you do the same thing on the foldable displays, you’ll kill it.”In theory, the clamshell designs of the Z Flip and the Razr offer a partial solution to the durability problem. That’s because the main screens are not exposed when folded up. Yet if you drop the phones while using them — say, when you are walking and texting and trip over something — you will have a problem.“There’s no protecting the foldable display in a real-world environment the way that consumers treat their smartphones,” said Raymond Soneira, the founder of DisplayMate, who advises tech companies on screen technology.Foldables also have a design flaw. In general, when they are unfolded, the screen has a visible crease — an eyesore compared with the seamless displays on our smartphones and tablets.Last but not least, it remains to be seen whether the mechanical hinges of folding phones will survive the test of time. There are early reports of potential problems with the hinge on the Razr: Some reviewers said the hinge is extremely tight, making it cumbersome to fold and flip open the phone. CNET, the tech reviews site, said the hinge of its Razr test unit broke after 27,000 cycles using a robot.Motorola said in a statement that it was confident in the durability of Razr, adding that CNET’s test method put undue stress on the hinge. Read the full article

Data of All 6.5 Million Israeli Voters Is Leaked

Israel’s Privacy Protection Authority said it was looking into what it called a “grave” security lapse by the maker of an app promoted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party that led to the exposure of personal data of all 6.5 million eligible voters in Israel, including full names and identity card numbers.The flawed website for the app, called Elector, failed to secure personal details in the voter registry, which also included the address and gender of each voter, even those who did not use it, and in some case phone numbers as well, the Haaretz newspaper first reported on Sunday, raising concerns about identity theft and foreign interference.The maker of Elector did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment, but in a statement issued to the Israeli news media, it sought to play down the potential consequences, describing the leak as a “one-off incident that was immediately dealt with” and saying it had since bolstered the site’s security.The data required essentially no hacking skills to access, and it was unknown how many people had downloaded the registry.Mr. Netanyahu had encouraged supporters to download the app, which offers news and information related to the March 2 election, the third in less than a year after the first two failed to provide an outright winner and efforts to form a coalition came up short.In a statement issued in response to the reports on Sunday, the Privacy Protection Authority, a unit of the Justice Ministry, said that responsibility for complying with Israeli privacy law involving use of the voter registry “lies with the parties themselves.”It stopped short of announcing a full-fledged investigation, however, and said it could not give further details at this stage. Ran Bar-Zik, a developer for Verizon Media who wrote the story the Haaretz published on Sunday, was alerted to the breach over the weekend.In an interview on Monday, he said he had received a tipoff about the Elector website breach on Friday night. The message was sent in English to Cybercyber, a Hebrew podcast that he runs that he hosts with two colleagues. As evidence, the tipster included Mr. Bar-Zik’s own details and those of his wife and son.“It was spooky,” Mr. Bar-Zik said.Explaining the ease with which the voter information could be accessed, Mr. Bar-Zik wrote in a blog post that visitors to the app’s website could right-click to “view source,” an action that reveals the code behind a web page.The code revealed the user names and passwords of site administrators, and using those credentials would allow anyone to log in and download the voter information.Mr. Bar-Zik said he chose the Likud administrator and “Jackpot! Everything was in front of me!”“When we talk about hacking, we imagine people in hoodies doing technical stuff,” Mr. Bar-Zik said. But in the Elector case, he added, no hacking technique was necessary.One Israeli website said it had been able to access the personal information of, among others, Mr. Netanyahu; his wife, Sara; the chief of staff for the Israeli military, Aviv Kochavi; and Nadav Argaman, the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency.The leak was believed to be the largest disclosure of Israeli voter information since 2006, when an employee of the Interior Ministry stole the population registry and then published it.The exposure of the database of Israeli voters could have significant consequences. Databases listing personal information of private citizens can be exploited for a number of purposes, including by criminals looking to make money through identity theft, or by foreign state-backed hackers looking to spy on Israeli voters ahead of a critical election.“This is a treasure for foreign countries with geostrategic interests in Israel,” Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, head of the Media Reform Project at the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Jerusalem, told Channel 12 news.Massive voter databases are one more reason that cybersecurity officials across the world have warned that new technology is best kept out of the hands of election officials and political parties.Most recommend that new technology, including voting machines and apps used by political parties, be tested for months, or even years before it is deployed to the general public.Cybersecurity experts specializing in election technology have begun holding specialized sessions at the world’s largest annual conference for hackers, DefCon. During the sessions they hack into voting machines and other technology used during elections around the world in an effort to lay their vulnerabilities bare.Last week, an app introduced by the Iowa Democratic Party to help tally votes during the Iowa caucus failed on the day of the vote, throwing the first-in-the-nation contest into chaos.The app, which had been privately developed for the party and had not been tested by independent cybersecurity experts, had been kept a secret by the party until the weeks leading up to the vote.When it was eventually unveiled, many had trouble downloading and using it. Cybersecurity experts quickly found the app was riddled with bugs and potential vulnerabilities. Read the full article

NASA-E.S.A. Solar Orbiter Launch: How to Watch

When Solar Orbiter launches, and how to watch it

An Atlas 5 rocket is scheduled take Solar Orbiter to space from a launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Sunday at 11:03 p.m. Eastern, around the time this year’s Academy Awards ceremony will come to an end.Forecasts currently call for an 80 percent chance of favorable weather, but if bad weather or technical problems arise, the launch can be pushed by as much as two hours into early Monday morning.Both NASA Television and the European Space Agency will broadcast coverage of the launch, beginning at 10:30 p.m. Eastern.

A new view of the sun

With Solar Orbiter, scientists will for the first time get a good view of the top and bottom of the sun. Until now, almost all of the solar-watching spacecraft have orbited in the ecliptic, or the same plane that the planets travel around the sun.That change of view could help solve mysteries about how the sun spews high-velocity charged particles that fly outward through the solar system and buffet the planets, including Earth. The magnetic fields that accelerate those particles flow into and out of the sun’s poles. The data from Solar Orbiter could help explain the sunspot cycle — Why does the cycle last 11 years? Why are some quiet and others roar violently? — and help models to predict solar storms that could disrupt Earth’s power grids and satellites in orbit.Ulysses, an earlier collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency launched in 1990, also passed over the sun’s poles, but at much farther distances, and it did not carry a camera.

A long and winding journey

The launch trajectory will take Solar Orbiter away from Earth into an orbit around the sun. A flyby of Venus on the day after Christmas will sap some of its energy and let it spiral closer toward the sun.Additional flybys — one of Earth, two more of Venus — will further adjust the orbit, which will still be in the ecliptic, the plane of the orbits.A flyby of Venus in 2025 will swing Solar Orbiter out of the ecliptic to an angle of 17 degrees. That is enough to get a good glimpse of the polar regions. Additional Venus flybys will increase the angle to 33 degrees.The mission is expected to complete 22 orbits of the sun in 10 years.

Solar Orbiter’s instruments

The spacecraft’s 10 scientific instruments are a mix. Some measure what is happening directly around the spacecraft, like the magnetic fields and particles of the solar wind. Others take pictures of what is occurring on the sun.Remember the caution that you should not look directly at the sun? Solar Orbiter’s cameras have to do just that, and at a distance where the sunlight is 13 times as intense. Three peepholes in the heat shield will open for 10 days at a time to allow the instruments to collect data. The assorted cameras also have heat-resistant windows (think of them as scientific sunglasses) as protection.The cameras will look at a range of wavelengths of light, including ultraviolet and X-rays. Some of the cameras break the light into separate wavelengths to identify specific molecules. The coronagraph includes a disk to block out most of the light to look at what is going on in the sun’s outer atmosphere.

Magnetic fields and solar storms

Occasionally, the sun erupts giant amounts of particles known as coronal mass ejections. When such an eruption slams into Earth’s magnetic field, it generates surges of electrical current.Solar scientists do not have reliable ways to predict such an eruption. The largest one known to hit Earth was the Carrington event in 1859, named after one of the people who observed an intensely bright spot on the sun where the eruption occurred. The surge caused some telegraph wires to catch fire.When Nicola J. Fox, director of NASA’s heliophysics division, talks about solar science to children at schools she introduces the Carrington event and how it knocked out the telegraph system in the U.S. for four days.“The kids just kind of look at me like, ‘So what?’,” she said. “And then I say, ‘Imagine you didn’t have your iPad for four days.’ Panic ensues in the classroom.”A similar event today could potentially cause not only continentwide blackouts, but also destroy giant transformers on the electric grid — damage that might take months or years to repair.A smaller solar storm in March 1989 knocked out power in Quebec for nine hours.Just a few years ago, Earth was lucky.On July 23, 2012, NASA’s Stereo-A spacecraft was hit by a gigantic coronal mass ejection. Analysis showed that this outburst was bigger than the Carrington eruption. If Earth had been where Stereo-A was — the spacecraft travels in the same orbit as Earth, but ahead of the planet — that would have been a very interesting day. Read the full article

Clearview’s Facial Recognition App Is Identifying Child Victims of Abuse

“We thought it was too controversial of a feature because it was too easy to use that functionality for abuse,” said Mr. Burns. “And also it’s just a legal nightmare.”Still, Mr. Burns said, he understood why investigators would want to use facial recognition software. “They are faced with a very grim task, and if there’s a tool that gives them an opportunity to safeguard victims, I don’t blame them for trying to grab it with both hands,” he said.Since Clearview’s practices have come to light, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Venmo and YouTube have sent the company cease-and-desist letters, asking it to stop scraping photos from their sites and delete existing images in its database. The attorney general of New Jersey banned the use of Clearview by officers in the state and called for an investigation into how it and similar technologies were being used by law enforcement. A class-action lawsuit seeking certification was filed in Illinois, where a strong biometric privacy law prohibits the use of residents’ faceprints without their consent, and another was filed on Feb. 3 in Virginia.Bills banning the use of facial recognition by police have recently been introduced in New York and Washington. And Clearview received a letter from Senator Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, asking for a list of law enforcement agencies that have used the app and whether biometric information has been collected for children under 13 years old.“While this type of technology has existed for quite some time, we believe we have created something that enables law enforcement to solve previously unsolvable crimes and, most importantly, protect vulnerable children,” Mr. Ton-That said in his email. “At the same time, we are responding to requests for information from government and other interested parties as appropriate, and look forward to engaging in constructive discussions with them as we work to make our communities safer.”In October, law enforcement groups sent a letter to members of Congress, urging them to not ban the use of facial recognition for their investigations. “We understand the public’s concern about protection of their privacy and civil rights,” they wrote. “With clear, publicly available policies we believe those concerns can be addressed.”Many agencies had been using Clearview for months at the time the letter was sent, but the letter made no mention of it.Michael H. Keller and Aaron Krolik contributed reporting. Read the full article

Uber Posts Faster Growth, but Loses $1.1 Billion

SAN FRANCISCO — Uber capped a difficult 2019 by posting faster growth in its ride-hailing business, even as it lost more money.On Thursday, Uber said its revenue in the fourth quarter of 2019 increased 37 percent to $4 billion from a year ago, faster than the 30 percent growth it recorded in the previous quarter. The company lost $1.1 billion, more than the $887 million it lost a year earlier.“We recognize that the era of growth at all costs is over,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s chief executive. “I’m gratified by our progress, steadily delivering against the commitments we’ve made to our shareholders on our path to profitability.”The results were driven by growth in Uber’s main ride-hailing business, with the number of trips rising 28 percent to more than 1.9 billion and revenue increasing 27 percent to more than $3 billion. In contrast, Uber’s food delivery business, called Uber Eats, lost $461 million on revenue of $734 million.Uber went into retreat for much of 2019 after staging a disappointing initial public offering in May. The company, which spends a lot of money to attract passengers and drivers, immediately faced doubts over whether it could ever make a profit. Since then, Uber’s stock has plunged.In response to its critics, Mr. Khosrowshahi has cut costs at the company and pulled back parts of its business. Last year, he laid off more than 1,000 employees and withdrew Uber’s food delivery service from South Korea. Last month, Mr. Khosrowshahi also sold Uber’s food delivery business in India to a local competitor, Zomato.Mr. Khosrowshahi has said Uber is aiming to make an operating profit by 2021.“Clearly, Uber has put out a somewhat aggressive timeline for profitability,” said Tom White, a senior equity analyst at D.A. Davidson. “These exits are partly a function of them making sure they meet that target.”Uber is dealing with other challenges. On Jan. 1, California legislation went into effect that may force the company to reclassify its drivers, who are freelancers, as employees. That would drive up Uber’s costs because it would have to provide them with benefits and other perks. Uber last year filed a suit to block the law and has asked for a preliminary injunction that would give it a reprieve from the new rules until the case was resolved.The company also faces hurdles in London, one of its biggest markets. In November, London authorities decided not to extend Uber’s taxi operating license because of persistent safety problems. Uber continues to operate there while it appeals the decision.“Regulation of ride sharing is finally catching up,” Mr. White said. “These businesses are looking less and less like these completely transformative, transportation-as-a-service models, and more and more like tech-enabled taxi companies. You have a lot more regulation, a lot more fees and a lot more oversight, which generally raises costs.”It has not been all bad news for the company. A court in Brazil ruled on Wednesday that Uber’s drivers could not be considered employees. Read the full article

An Algorithm That Grants Freedom, or Takes It Away

“We walked into a hornet’s nest I didn’t even know existed,” Mr. Stephens said.In response to the protests, the state commission recommended a much simpler setup based on software already used by the state courts. But even this algorithm is difficult for a layperson to understand. Asked to explain it, Mr. Stephens suggested speaking with another commissioner.Nyssa Taylor, criminal justice policy counsel with the Philadelphia A.C.L.U., was among the protesters. She worries that algorithms will exacerbate rather than reduce racial bias. Even if governments share how the systems arrive at their decisions — which happens in Philadelphia in some cases — the math is sometimes too complex for most people to wrap their heads around.Various algorithms embraced by the Philadelphia criminal justice system were designed by Richard Berk, a professor of criminology and statistics at Penn. These algorithms do not use ZIP codes or other location data that could be a proxy for race, he said. And though he acknowledged that a layperson couldn’t easily understand the algorithm’s decisions, he said human judgment has the same problem.“All machine-learning algorithms are black boxes, but the human brain is also a black box,” Dr. Berk said. “If a judge decides they are going to put you away for 20 years, that is a black box.”Mark Houldin, a former public defender who was also among the protesters, said he was concerned that the algorithms were unfairly attaching labels to individuals as they moved through the criminal justice system.In an affidavit included with a lawsuit recently filed by the defender’s office, a former Philadelphia probation officer said the probation department’s predictive algorithm also affected arraignment hearings. For years, she said, if someone was arrested and charged with a new crime while on probation — and had been deemed “high risk” by the algorithm — the probation office automatically instructed the jail not to release the person.A spokesman for Philadelphia County denied that the system operated this way. “Every detainer issued is reviewed by supervisory staff of” the probation department, he said, “and notice is sent to the appropriate judicial authority.” Read the full article