Today, I’m talking to Kashmir Hill, a New York Times reporter whose new book, Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It, chronicles the story of Clearview AI, a company that’s built some of the most sophisticated facial recognition and search technology that’s ever existed. As Kashmir reports, you simply plug a photo of someone into Clearview’s app, and it will find every photo of that person that’s ever been posted on the internet. It’s breathtaking and scary.
Kashmir is a terrific reporter. At The Verge, we have been jealous of her work across Forbes, Gizmodo, and now, the Times for years. She’s long been focused on covering privacy on the internet, which she is first to describe as the dystopia beat because the amount of tracking that occurs all over our networks every day is almost impossible to fully understand or reckon with. But people get it when the systems start tracking faces — when that last bit of anonymity goes away. And, remarkably, Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook have had the ability to track faces like this for years, but they haven’t really done anything with it. It seems like that’s a line that’s too hard for a lot of people to cross.
But not everyone. Your Face Belongs to Us is the story of Clearview AI, a secretive startup that, until January 2020, was virtually unknown to the public, despite selling this state-of-the-art facial recognition system to cops and corporations. The company’s co-founders Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz are some of the most interesting and complex characters in tech, with some direct connections to right-wing money and politics.
Clearview scraped the public internet from billions of photos, using everything from Venmo transactions to Flickr posts. With that data, it built a comprehensive database of faces and made it searchable. Clearview sees itself as the Google of facial recognition, reorganizing the internet by face searches, and its primary customers have become police departments and now the Department of Homeland Security.
Kashmir was the journalist who broke the first story about Clearview’s existence, starting with a bombshell investigation report that blew the doors open on the company’s clandestine operations. Over the past few years, she’s been relentlessly reporting on Clearview’s growth, the privacy implications of facial recognition technology, and all of the cautionary tales that inevitably popped up, from wrongful arrests to billionaires using the technology for personal vendettas. The book is fantastic. If you’re a Decoder listener, you’re going to love it, and I highly recommend it.
You might not think about it as much as you do eating healthy, exercising, and getting enough sleep, but maintaining good circulation is one of the most important building blocks to keeping your health on the rails.
“The circulatory system of the body delivers vital oxygen and nutrients to all of our muscles and organs,” says Vincent Varghese, D.O., a cardiac interventionist at Deborah Heart and Lung Center in New Jersey. “When plaque or arterial blockages develop, normal blood flow is hindered and can lead to devastating effects, such as heart attack, stroke, or even leg amputation [in severe cases].”
The process of plaque build-up is a slow one and usually takes decades, he adds, yet studies have shown the precursors of plaque developing as early as our twenties. A sedentary lifestyle, unhealthy eating, high blood pressure, diabetes, smoking, and a family history of early heart or vascular disease can all contribute to poor circulation.
“The most common symptom of impaired circulation to the legs is claudication,” says Caitlin W. Hicks, M.D., a board-certified vascular surgeon and associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. “It’s a condition where you may experience pain in the buttocks or calves when walking that goes away with rest.”
Cold extremities, leg swelling, and foot wounds that take a while to heal, especially if you have a family history, are all signs you should check in with a vascular specialist.
With WiFi calling, you can make or receive calls with your smartphone over a WiFi connection in areas where you have poor cellular signal. It’s supported by most modern smartphones and most carriers, including Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. Of course, you won’t be able to do any of this unless you know how to turn on WiFi calling in the first place.
Once you understand the basics and have enabled WiFi calling on your iPhone or Android phone, you can dig deeper into other important questions like how this technology actually works and if it’s free for international calls.
How does WiFi calling work?
WiFi calling is like a cross between regular cell phone calls and VOIP services like Skype that allow you to make phone calls from your computer. Instead of using a third-party service, your phone call is routed through the internet to your cell provider and then connected over the cellular network to the person you’re calling (or is calling you). This means that it still uses your phone number and your cell provider’s network, rather than a username, email address, or anything else.
The big difference between WiFi calling and regular calling is that it uses your WiFi network, not your mobile data. This means it works well in areas where you have bad cell signal but good WiFi signal, like if you have a satellite internet connection at your rural cabin or just live in a building with an unreliable cell service. WiFi calling won’t help you if you’re out on a hike or otherwise totally off-the-grid, though. And if you have a good mobile data connection at home, you won’t notice much difference.
How to turn on WiFi calling on an iPhone
To enable WiFi calling on an iPhone, go to Settings > Phone > WiFi Calling. If you don’t see the option, it is most likely because your carrier doesn’t support WiFi calling. You may be prompted to enter or confirm your address, so your phone can pass your location on to emergency services if you call them.
All modern iPhones support WiFi calling, although some networks only support the iPhone 6 (released in 2014) and newer. Basically, unless you are using a 10-year-old iPhone that you’ve somehow kept running, your iPhone supports WiFi calling.
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Everything to know about WiFi calling. Brett Jordan / Unsplash
For 40 years there’s been an invisible hand guiding the way many of us write, work, and communicate. Its influence has been pervasive, yet its impact has been subtle to the extent that you’ve likely never noticed. That invisible hand is Microsoft Word.
At its launch in October 1983, this influential software was known as Multi-Tool Word, and not long after, changed to Microsoft Word for Dos. Back then, there were more than 300 word processing programs across multiple platforms. People of a certain age will remember WordStar or WordPerfect, yet in a little over a decade, Word eclipsed these rivals. By 1994, Microsoft says it had claimed a 90% share of the word-processing market, making it one of the most successful, well-known software products in history.
While establishing how many people use Word is tricky, recent filings show there are 1.4 billion Windows devices in use each month, and more than 90% of the Fortune 500 use the software. If only a third of those people used Word, it would still be more than the population of North America.
This context is important because it helps to explain why, and how, Word has had such influence on our lives.
Ironically, given its ubiquity, Word has rarely been a pioneer when it comes to features. As mentioned, it was far from the first word processor. It’s often credited with introducing grammar tools, despite the fact these were developed decades earlier. And the idea behind “track changes” – where you can see edits to a document – wasn’t a Microsoft invention.
Yet Word’s superpower was using smart, simple design choices to make such features accessible to a global audience, not just techies. Its “What You See is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) design philosophy is now commonplace in software and on the internet. Word introduced line breaks, along with bold and italic fonts on screen. It revolutionized typeset-quality printing, as well as the use of templates. And it was in these templates that Word’s early impact on communication emerged.
AceHistoryDesk – Today in History – October 26: Mahalia Jackson, the “Queen of Gospel Song,” was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 26, 1911. She was the daughter of Charity Clark, a laundress and maid, and Johnny Jackson, a Baptist preacher, barber, and longshoreman. Her mother died when she was five years old and […]
It’s been more than 40 years since the physicist Richard Feynman pointed out that building computing devices based on quantum principles could unlock powers far greater than those of “classical” computers. In a 1981 keynote speech often credited with launching the field of quantum computing, Feynman concluded with a now-famous quip:
“Nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical.”
It’s been nearly 30 years since the mathematician Peter Shor came up with the first potentially transformative use for quantum computers. Much of the security of the digital world is built upon the assumption that factoring large numbers is a challenging and time-consuming task. Shor showed how to use qubits — quantum objects that can exist in mixtures of 0 and 1 — to do it in a heartbeat, at least relative to known classical methods.
Researchers feel quite confident (although not entirely certain) that Shor’s quantum algorithm beats all classical algorithms because — despite the tremendous incentives — no one has successfully broken modern encryption with a classical machine. But for tasks less glamorous than factoring, it’s hard to say for sure whether quantum methods are superior. Searching for further blockbuster applications has become something of a haphazard guessing game.
“This is a silly way to go about this,” said Crystal Noel, a physicist at Duke University.
Over the last 20 years, a loose confederation of mathematically inclined physicists and physically inclined mathematicians has endeavored to more clearly identify the power of the quantum realm. Their goal? To find a way to quantify quantumness. They dream of a number they can assign to an arrangement of qubits produced by some quantum calculation. If the number is low, then it would be easy to simulate that calculation on a laptop. If it’s high, the qubits represent the answer to a truly hard problem beyond the reach of any classical device.
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How might we measure the computational power of a quantum system? Researchers have identified an assortment of physical properties that could do the trick. Peter Greenwood for Quanta Magazine
In 1925, a new, highly desirable trait was invented. Press reports hailed a new Hollywood star: Count Ludwig von Salm-Hoogstraeten, an Austrian noble and tennis champion, who was rumored to be appearing in a film from the megaproducer Samuel Goldwyn. What made the 39-year-old Hollywood material? “He is photogenic,” Goldwyn told a reporter. Newspapers quickly credited the producer with coining a new word.
As it turned out, von Salm-Hoogstraeten’s acting career did not take off, but Goldwyn’s turn of phrase sure did. Now, nearly a century later, photogenicity is essential to the vocabulary of the selfie era. A photogenic person, common thinking goes, looks effortlessly good in a photograph. On social media, photogenicity has become a kind of currency: the intangible “it” factor that can lead to a high follower count. As a result, articles now promise to unspool the secrets of photogenicity; people on TikTok have been taking random stills from their videos to apparently determine whether they’re photogenic. For the rest of us, the concept might serve to justify an aversion to selfies (we’re not unattractive; we’re just not photogenic).
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Illustration by Jared Bartman / The Atlantic. Sources: Austrian National Library; Unsplash.
In the world, human beings are facing various problems. People who are full of greed, anger, and ignorance are seen to be fighting with each other in words and deeds. As the fighting continues, various problems such as civil wars, wars of aggression, and wars of aggression are occurring. As world peace is being destroyed, humans are facing unbearable problems. Innocent children and women are not getting the rights they deserve and deserve. I can't think of one thing every time. What is it? The United Nations. If we look at the responsibilities and duties of the United Nations, I think it is not suitable for solving the problems that are happening in the world today. In fact, the United Nations and the World Security Council, such an organization must rule the world, must be able to give orders, and must have various ways to obey orders. There must be no organization that can influence more than that organization. There should be experts from each country. They can even dominate the superpowers like the US, China, and Britain. Only then will global peace be achieved quickly. Now, if a country with power develops more militarily, economically, or socially than its own country, then powerful countries will jealously seek out enemies and wage war. Or they will attack with fighter jets. In this, innocent people are losing their lives. No one understands the value of a life. You should think about how to achieve global peace by controlling these. If the US continues to be the permanent president of the UN, world peace will never be achieved. If you think carefully, no one sees that they are working for the common good, but for their own benefit, for the benefit of their own country. The permanent president of the UN and the Security Council has rejected this, As a young Rohingya, I have come to realize that only by electing the president and secretary from among the countries in the world through a secret ballot system and governing the world fairly can we achieve global peace. The United Nations and the Security Council are organizations in which any country must govern, give orders, and make them obey their orders. For example, only when a defendant is tried in court can we hold the leaders of the countries in check and control them, can we achieve global peace smoothly. Otherwise, it will not be easy for powerful countries to use various excuses to end this war every year, every year, for the benefit of themselves and their countries. No country's leaders pay any attention to the words of the United Nations and the Security Council. If we look at it in practice, look at the Rohingya issue. Myanmar is a small country. Even that country has been under siege for 8 years. What action can be taken? Why is the UN and the Security Council Powerless? Without such Power, how can the organization bring about global peace? Everyone should think about it. Whether there is a veto or a strong one, all countries in the world can only achieve global peace if they are subject to the UN and the Security Council. Seek peace in the quiet embrace of nature. Peace is an indispensable need of the human race. It is not as if one person can kill another person, and it is as if one country can attack another country, but instead of trying to build peace, we must try to destroy the peace now, and the world is getting hotter and is on the verge of collapse. I especially appeal to all the world experts to urgently try to bring about peace in all parts of the world. Mr, Noor Muhamed Arkhan Rohingya Youth Myanmar
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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Photo illustration by Alex Parkin / The Verge
Everything to know about WiFi calling. 
(Image credit: Alamy)
Illustration by Jared Bartman / The Atlantic. Sources: Austrian National Library; Unsplash.
