On Tuesday, the Senate confirmed Neil Jacobs as the new director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
This appointment marks a pivotal moment for NOAA, which is focused on selecting a leader with extensive expertise in atmospheric sciences. The agency is tasked with weather forecasting and climate record management, areas of contention during the Trump administration.
Nevertheless, Jacobs’ involvement in the 2019 Sharpy Gate controversy has drawn criticism, suggesting he may have yielded to political pressures.
Sharpy Gate originated from President Trump’s erroneous claim that Hurricane Dorian threatened Alabama. Despite local forecasters from the National Weather Service in Birmingham stating the area was not at risk, Trump intensified his assertions and showcased a hurricane forecast altered with a Black Sharpie.
Following this, NOAA leadership reprimanded local weather officials, and Jacobs, who was serving as NOAA’s assistant secretary for environmental observation at the time, was caught in the controversy.
The National Academy of Administrative Affairs conducted an investigation and concluded that Jacobs breached NOAA’s ethical standards.
At his confirmation hearing in July, Jacobs stated that he would approach a similar situation differently today.
Jacobs received bipartisan support in a committee vote last month, with five Democrats joining Republicans in favor of his nomination.
On Tuesday, he was confirmed as part of a broader package that included a dozen ambassador nominations.
Under President Trump’s second term, NOAA has already seen significant changes, including the announcement of hundreds of job cuts followed by the rehiring of many positions.
Additionally, the Trump administration has proposed substantial budget cuts for the agency and has also moved to suspend its climate change report, a crucial component of NOAA’s duties.
During the confirmation hearing, Jacobs emphasized that staffing should be a priority, recognizing that human factors play a vital role alongside natural changes in climate.
The hearing occurred shortly after severe flooding in Texas, prompting Jacobs to highlight the importance of providing timely warnings during such weather emergencies.
“Modernizing our monitoring and warning distribution systems will be my top priority,” he declared.
Jacobs also advocated for the establishment of a Natural Disaster Review Committee, inspired by the National Transportation Safety Board.
“We need increased data collection and post-storm evaluations,” he said. “Understanding what went right and wrong and whether warnings reached the public is essential.”
wHeng Min* discovered a concealed camera in her bedroom, initially hoping for a benign explanation, suspecting her boyfriend might have set it up to capture memories of their “happy life” together. However, that hope quickly morphed into fear as she realized her boyfriend had been secretly taking sexually exploitative photos of her and her female friends, as well as other women in various locations. They even used AI technology to create pornographic images of them.
When Ming confronted him, he begged for forgiveness but became angered when she refused to reconcile. I said to a Chinese news outlet, Jimu News.
Ming is not alone; many women in China have fallen victim to voyeuristic filming in both private and public spaces, including restrooms. Such images are often shared or sold online without consent. Sexually explicit photos, frequently captured via pinhole cameras hidden in everyday objects, are disseminated in large online groups.
This scandal has stirred unrest in China, raising concerns about the government’s capability and willingness to address such misconduct.
A notable group on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, is the “Maskpark Tree Hole Forum,” which reportedly boasted over 100,000 members, mostly male.
“The Mask Park incident highlights the extreme vulnerability of Chinese women in the digital realm,” stated Li Maizi, a prominent Chinese feminist based in New York, to the Guardian.
“What’s more disturbing is the frequency of perpetrators who are known to their victims: committing sexual violence against partners, boyfriends, and even minors.”
The scandal ignited outrage on Chinese social media, stirring discussions about the difficulties of combating online harassment in the nation. While Chinese regulators are equipped to impose stricter measures against online sexual harassment and abuse, their current focus appears to prioritize suppressing politically sensitive information, according to Eric Liu, a former content moderator for Chinese social media platforms and present editor of the Digital Times based in the US.
Since the scandal emerged, Li has observed “widespread” censorship concerning the Mask Park incident on Chinese internet. Posts with potential social impact, especially those related to feminism, are frequently subject to censorship.
“If the Chinese government had the will, they could undoubtedly shut down the group,” Li noted. “The scale of [MaskPark] is significant. Cases of this magnitude have not gone unchecked in recent years.”
Nevertheless, Li expressed that he is not surprised. “Such content has always existed on the Chinese internet.”
In China, individuals found guilty of disseminating pornographic material can face up to two years in prison, while those who capture images without consent may be detained for up to ten days and fined. The country also has laws designed to protect against sexual harassment, domestic violence, and cyberbullying.
However, advocates argue that the existing legal framework falls short. Victims often find themselves needing to gather evidence to substantiate their claims, as explained by Xirui*, a Beijing-based lawyer specializing in gender-based violence cases.
“Certain elements must be met for an action to be classified as a crime, such as a specific number of clicks and subjective intent,” Xirui elaborated.
“Additionally, there’s a limitation on public safety lawsuits where the statute of limitations is only six months, after which the police typically will not pursue the case.”
The Guardian contacted China’s Foreign Ministry for a statement.
Beyond legal constraints, victims of sexual offenses often grapple with shame, which hinders many from coming forward.
“There have been similar cases where landlords set up cameras to spy on female tenants. Typically, these situations are treated as privacy violations, which may lead to controlled detention, while victims seek civil compensation,” explained Xirui.
To address these issues, the government could strengthen specialized laws, enhance gender-based training for law enforcement personnel, and encourage courts to provide guidance with examples of pertinent cases, as recommended by legal experts.
For Li, the recent occurrences reflect a pervasive tolerance for and lack of effective law enforcement regarding these issues in China. Instead of prioritizing the fight against sexist and abusive content online, authorities seem more focused on detaining female writers involved in homoerotic fiction and censoring victims of digital abuse.
“The rise of deepfake technology and the swift online distribution of poorly filmed content have rendered women’s bodies digitally accessible on an unparalleled scale,” stated Li. “However, if authorities truly wish to address these crimes, it is entirely feasible to track and prosecute them, provided they invest the necessary resources and hold the Chinese government accountable.”
*Name changed
Additional research by Lillian Yang and Jason Tang Lu
The U.S. Supreme Court discussed Meta’s Facebook’s attempt to dismiss a federal securities fraud lawsuit brought by shareholders. The lawsuit accuses the social media platform of deceiving users about its misuse of user data.
The Supreme Court heard arguments in Facebook’s appeal against a lower court’s decision allowing a 2018 class action lawsuit by Amalgamated Bank to move forward. The lawsuit aims to recover lost value of investors’ Facebook stock. Another lawsuit filed this month involves Nvidia, where litigants accuse the company of securities fraud, potentially making accountability more challenging.
The key issue is whether Facebook broke the law by not disclosing previous data breaches in its risk disclosures, portraying the risks as hypothetical.
Facebook argued in its brief to the Supreme Court that reasonable investors would see risk disclosures as forward-looking statements, eliminating the need to disclose previous risks that materialized.
Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Samuel Alito raised questions during the hearing, asserting that risk assessment is always forward-looking.
The plaintiffs accused Facebook of violating the Securities Exchange Act by misleading investors about a 2015 data breach involving Cambridge Analytica. The case was initially dismissed, but the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal led to various investigations and legal actions against Facebook. The Supreme Court is expected to reach a decision by June.
Despite the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, there are differing views on how investors interpret forward-looking risk disclosures.
Facebook’s stock price dropped after reports in 2018 regarding the misuse of user data by Cambridge Analytica in connection with President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
In a time where concerns over media manipulation are at an all-time high, the Princess of Wales’ photo scandal highlights the sensitivity towards image manipulation.
Back in 2011, Duchess Kate found herself in an image-editing scandal when Grazia altered a photo of her on her wedding day. However, this was before advancements in artificial intelligence raised significant concerns for everyone.
Recent years have seen an abundance of AI-generated deepfakes, from manipulated videos of Volodymyr Zelensky to explicit images of Taylor Swift. While historical instances of image manipulation have been controversial, AI-generated content is now highly reliable.
Duchess Kate’s recent adjustment to a family photo amidst social media speculation about her health reflects growing questions about trust in images, texts, and audio content as the world faces crucial elections.
Shweta Singh, an assistant professor at Warwick Business School, emphasized the importance of addressing manipulated media in the critical year of 2024.
Michael Green, a senior lecturer at the University of Kent, noted that the Welsh family photos were amateurishly edited but pointed out that recent online uproar prompted major video agencies to remove them for violating guidelines.
Despite guidelines against manipulation, the photos passed through. This incident serves as a reminder for media organizations to thoroughly scrutinize every story in an age of technological sophistication.
Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, provided assurance that the images were not entirely generated by AI, indicating the need for deeper scrutiny.
Technological advancements like AI pose new challenges in detecting manipulated media, requiring a diverse approach to combat disinformation.
Efforts to address this issue include the Coalition on Content Authenticity, involving members like Adobe, the BBC, and Google, to establish standards for identifying AI-generated disinformation.
Dame Wendy Hall, a professor at the University of Southampton, emphasized that the Welsh family photo incident underscores the ongoing challenge of trusting the narrative in evolving technological landscapes.
TThe Post Office Horizon scandal has long been a frustrating one to follow as a technology reporter. Because even though it stems from the failure to deploy a large-scale government IT project, it’s not about technology at all.
In such stories there is a desire to uncover the specific fault lines that caused the disaster to occur. Taking Grenfell Tower as an example, the entire system was flawed and the investigation into the fire revealed gory details, but it is also clear that the fatal error was in covering the building with combustible panels. Identifying that fulcrum leads both ways to further questions (how were the panels deemed safe, and was the building able to be safely evacuated despite their flaws?), but the catastrophic It is clear where it is.
I feel like there should be comparable focus points in the Horizon system. “What happened at Horizon that led to so many false accounts?” is a question I’ve asked many times over the decade since I first learned of the scandal. Thanks to Computer Weekly for the coverage. I searched for systems in the hopes of finding some important crux, a terrible decision around which all subsequent problems swirl, that could be sensibly explained to provide a technical foundation for a very human story of malice and greed. I’ve been looking into architecture.
Still, the conclusion I’m forced to draw is that Horizon was really, really broken. From toe to toe, the system was terrible. Each postmaster had fundamentally different flaws, so a plethora of technical errors, worst practice decisions, and lazy cutbacks were probably part of the reason the Postal Service continued to fight for so long. Masu.
One system continued to accept input even when the screen froze, writing transactions to the database invisibly, while other systems simply had edge-case bugs in the underlying system that caused transactions to change. It just couldn’t lock when it shouldn’t have. There was also a problem with the network with the central database, causing transactions to be dropped without warning whenever there was a problem with the data connection.
Still, if you want to trace the point in time when bad IT became a crisis, you need to look completely into the technology past. The Post Office declared Horizon to be functional as legal tender. Everything that happened after that was a logical conclusion. If Horizon works, the cause of the error should be in the subpostmaster operation. If they say they haven’t made a mistake, they must have committed fraud. If they committed fraud, a conviction is morally right.
But Horizon didn’t work.
Today’s big technology companies aren’t so cocky as to claim that their software is perfect. In fact, the opposite is accepted as reality. The phrase “all software has bugs” is repeated too often and casually, implying that users are demanding too much of the technology they rely and work reliably on.
But they often still act as if they believe the opposite. My inbox is constantly filled with unmanageable people who have been falsely flagged as spammers, scammers, or robots by Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple’s automated systems. These people have lost years of shopping, lost access to friends and family, and lost the pages and profiles on which they built their careers. I can’t help them all and still do my day job, but strangely enough, the cases I decide I can contact a large company for are almost always easily resolved. It turns out.
No one would argue that even the worst software Google has put out is as broken as Horizon. (The Post Office says the current version of the software, created in 2017, has been found to be “robust compared to comparable systems.”) But the real culprit is broken software with flaws. If you’re acting like something isn’t supposed to be there, that’s serious. The tech industry may have more lessons to learn from this scandal than it’s willing to admit.
I
In any major scandal that has the power to monopolize national attention, there are always key moments when events could have been stopped in their tracks. But few early warnings were as prescient as his seven-page memo handed to postal workers 25 years ago.
During an acrimonious meeting at Newcastle Rugby Club in 1999, the memo set out a number of concerns raised by postmasters in the north-east of England who were trialling the now infamous Horizon accounting system. It had been. Problems such as account balances caused stress for some people, forcing them to work late into the night.
Shortly after these concerns were raised, the subpostmasters met again to discuss the potential severity of the problem.
“The hardship and trauma that some postmasters are experiencing has raised concerns about their health and mental well-being,” the meeting was informed.
“Some felt that unless something changed soon, tragedy was not far away. The software was of poor quality and was not intended to run such a large network. Ta.”
Warnings of potential tragedy come as the flawed software – later found to have the potential to cause false losses that were blamed on postal workers – is rolled out across the Post Office network. done before.
But from the moment of the fateful decision to press forward with this destiny, a disastrous combination of legal change, geopolitics, a catastrophic lack of political curiosity, and above all outright deception, ultimately led to Thousands of innocent workers were victimized and prosecuted, with devastating effects.
At least four people took their own lives this week, the week in which Westminster finally acknowledged that unprecedented mass exonerations were needed to right more than two decades of injustice. Sadly, it was too late for the dozens of postmasters who were wronged and died, including one who died.
Former Posts Minister Paul Scally announced an independent inquiry into the Horizon scandal in 2020. Photo: Bloomberg/Getty Images
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
