Ice Lounge Media

Ice Lounge Media

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one or two-year subscription for 50% off.


Dear Sophie:

The last 24 hours have been a nail-biter; I feel powerless and I’m angry that we’ve come to this. I’m worried things won’t improve and I’m confused about where we even stand.

Sometimes I just feel so very, very tired of the struggle. I am just so ready to let go. I want to live in a world where we can create harmony, peace and opportunity for all. Can I still find that in the United States?

— Wanting in Walnut Creek

Dear Wanting,

I hear you.

The good news is that there is great potential, even as the world watches the U.S. presidential election results. If anything, what the last four years have taught me is that two clichés are really true: necessity is the mother of invention, and, where there is a will, there is a way. I can relate to many folks around the world because I know what it’s like to have the world of Silicon Valley feel so close, yet so far away, at a time when I felt powerless to make a difference.

Looking back over the past four years, amazing things have been possible for our clients and my team at Alcorn Immigration Law. I founded the firm out of my kitchen just years ago when my kids were toddlers. I would look out my kitchen window hand-washing tiny baby dishes. I can still remember the feeling of the suds on my fingers as I gazed longingly at the tall building on Castro Street in downtown Mountain View where 500 Startups used to sit on the top floor. YC was just down the street.

I felt so powerless. I desperately wanted to make the world a better place, and reaching the world of Silicon Valley, even though it was just past my backyard, seemed like getting to Mars.

From those humble beginnings to now, as I founded and bootstrapped Alcorn Immigration Law on my own journey of becoming a single mom, I know what’s possible, even during the last four years of the Trump administration. We’ve had amazing success — claiming thousands of victories in supporting companies, people and families to live and work legally in the United States. If I was able to grow my firm during the last four years, I know that it’s possible for anybody to follow their heart and succeed. It’s our human essence to long to be a creator in this world, and anybody can and deserves to make a difference.

And here is what else I know: immigration law is created by acts of Congress and signed into law by the president. Mere tweets may be intended to try to bend the rules, but they cannot break them. That is what democracy is about.

In democracy, we have agreed to abide by basic laws, such as the inviolable dignity of the human being and that we want to agree on procedures for how we make decisions, like the process of passing a law about immigration. Democracy is not about majority tyranny. Democracy is about the fact that we uphold a few principles and we agreed on a decision-making process. When Trump ignores our basic laws and he ignores our legal processes, democracy is in peril.

But democracy does not need to be disrupted, it only requires small adjustments to thrive. In any group it is possible to make jointly supported decisions, taking the needs and resources of all into consideration. “Although the world is complex and decision making is complex, the components of decision making are simple,” according to Richard Graf, founder of K-i-E. Simple tools like the DecisionMaker can allow a miracle to happen — in an environment of openness and anonymity, we can all safely share our needs and concerns so that proposals can be formed based on collective best practices, knowledge, experience, intelligence and intuition. Even if it’s a complex situation, the way forward can immediately become clear.

And in our democracy, the paths to live and work in the U.S. will always remain viable, even if we need to remove a branch or navigate around a new boulder. Here at Alcorn, despite the furor and fear-mongering present in the world surrounding immigration, we are continually securing real victories for our clients. Not a client yet? Global founders can still create a startup, pitch it to investors and secure pathways to live and work legally in the United States with visas, green cards and citizenship.

So I know this and will repeat: Whatever the election results, there will still be many ways for people to legally navigate the U.S. immigration process and access the opportunity and security of life here. For more insight on these ways, please join my Election Results Webinar next week.

In the meantime, here are my thoughts on how the election results will affect the future of U.S. immigration:

Looking ahead, if Biden takes the victory, he has pledged to undo all Trump-era immigration regulations in the first 100 days and support comprehensive immigration reform. He promised to promote immigrant entrepreneurship, which could finally mean a startup visa! He also wants to speed up naturalization, rescind the Muslim travel bans, pass legislation to expand the number of H-1Bs, increase the amount of employment-based green cards, exempt international STEM PhD graduates from needing to await a priority date, create a new type of green card to promote regional economic development and support immigrant entrepreneur incubators.

Alternatively, we can expect that a Trump administration would continue restricting immigration, leading to litigation and judges deciding the fate of many recent policies. We can foresee a continued COVID freeze on green card interviews at consulates.

Also, DHS recently announced its intent to remove the randomness from the H-1B lottery and prioritize the annual H-1B selection process from highest to lowest wage starting in spring 2021. I’m sure there will be litigation about this; in the meantime, Alcorn Immigration Law continues to recommend that all employers proceed with registering employees and candidates in the lottery as usual. These details will take time to shake out and we don’t want anybody to lose a chance at being selected.

In other updates, immigration is just continuing along and there is actually some great news for folks: The State Department recently released the November Visa Bulletin and it stayed the same from October. (If you think your priority date is current or may be current soon, please contact your attorney as soon as possible to discuss filing your I-485 this month to avoid the possibility of retrogression in December!)

And if you need the freedom to build your startup, but were told that you don’t yet qualify for an O-1A visa, EB-1A or EB-2 NIW green card, you can join me in Extraordinary Ability Bootcamp with promo code DEARSOPHIE to receive 20% off.

We’re optimistic about the future. Life always offers us opportunities to grow through contrast and uncertainty, and we remain passionate about our mission to create greater freedom, empowerment, knowledge and love in the world.

Sophie


Have a question? Ask it here. We reserve the right to edit your submission for clarity and/or space. The information provided in “Dear Sophie” is general information and not legal advice. For more information on the limitations of “Dear Sophie,” please view our full disclaimer here. You can contact Sophie directly at Alcorn Immigration Law.

Sophie’s podcast, Immigration Law for Tech Startups, is available on all major podcast platforms. If you’d like to be a guest, she’s accepting applications!

Read more

This year’s presidential election has already proven to be a considerable test of the U.S. democratic system. It’s also been doing a fine job testing the systems behind leading social networks four years after a rather disinformation-ridden election. Twitter today has proven to be reasonably swift — if not entirely proactive — in its push to label problematic information.

Video, which is largely considered more difficult to police, has been another story on many of these sites. At issue are videos like One American News Network’s (OAN) “Trump Won.” Posted this morning, the report echoes the president’s earlier sentiment that he has both won the election and that states and/or the Democratic Party are attempting to “steal the election.” As of this writing, the election has, emphatically, not been decided.

YouTube parent Google had earlier outlined potential violations in the lead up to the election, noting that it would:

Remov[e] content that contains hacked information, the disclosure of which may interfere with democratic processes, such as elections and censuses. For example, videos that contain hacked information about a political candidate shared with the intent to interfere in an election. Removing content encouraging others to interfere with democratic processes, such as obstructing or interrupting voting procedures. For example, telling viewers to create long voting lines with the purpose of making it harder for others to vote.

After outreach, the company told the press that the video is not in violation of its Community guidelines, but added that it has pulled ads from the content.

“Our Community Guidelines prohibit content misleading viewers about voting, for example content aiming to mislead voters about the time, place, means or eligibility requirements for voting, or false claims that could materially discourage voting,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “The content of this video doesn’t rise to that level. All search results and videos about this election — including this video — surface an information panel noting that election results may not be final and we are continuing to raise up authoritative content in search results and recommendations. Additionally, we remove ads from videos that contain content that is demonstrably false about election results, like this video. We will continue to be vigilant in the post-election period.”

The video now also sports a “U.S. Elections” module below that notes, “Results may not be final. See the latest on Google,” directing users to a search page. In a separate post, it notes that it, “aim[s] to surface videos from experts, like public health institutions, in search results,” meaning that a video such as the one referenced above would theoretically be deprioritized in search under more authoritative outlets, including, CNN, Fox News, Jovem Pan, India Today and The Guardian.

The coming weeks and months will no doubt provide ample opportunity to assess these responses from these platforms and whether their responses ultimately did enough to address misinformation and disinformation during a particularly uncertain time in U.S. electoral history.

Read more

You may have heard that the United States had a presidential election yesterday, with plenty of implications for the tech world, particularly with social media as one of the battlegrounds in the fight over the results. Meanwhile, major tech-relevant ballot measures, like California’s Proposition 22, also passed. I’ll do my best to cover it all in your Daily Crunch for November 4, 2020.

The big story: Social media confronts election misinformation

Here’s the good news: Election Day in the United States was largely free from disruptive cyberattacks.

The bad news? Well, we don’t have a winner in the presidential election yet — although Joe Biden is up 2% in the popular vote as I write this on Wednesday afternoon, and he’s leading narrowly in key battleground states. The uncertainty has created a big opportunity for misinformation, particularly from President Donald Trump and others involved with his campaign who are trying to cast doubt on the voting and vote-counting process while prematurely claiming victory.

As my colleague Taylor Hatmaker put it, this is a “nightmare misinformation scenario,” with the president and his campaign doing their best to “work the misinformation ecosystem he’s cultivated over the last four years.”

At least Facebook and Twitter are trying to stem the spread in different ways: Twitter has added warning labels to numerous Trump and Trump campaign posts (Trump and his campaign members aren’t the only ones getting warnings labels right now, but to be clear: They’re the ones spreading dangerous misinformation about the results — while the Biden campaign is, to put it simply, not). Facebook also added messages at the top of both Facebook and Instagram noting that votes are still being counted.

The tech giants

Apple, Microsoft and other tech stocks roar as the presidential election narrows to several states — At the close of trading today, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite was up 3.8%.

Zynga reports record revenue and strong user growth while still losing $122M — The company predicted further growth in Q4, with revenue up 55% to $570 million.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Intel has acquired Cnvrg.io, a platform to manage, build and automate machine learning — Intel continues to snap up startups to build out its machine learning and AI operations.

Aveine’s Smart Wine Aerator is a huge upgrade for wine lovers, and could create some new ones, too — This gadget from a French startup offers variable, instant aeration, along with a connected app platform.

Hustle Fund, a pre-seed firm, closes $30M for a new fund — Hustle Fund was created by Elizabeth Yin and Eric Bahn, two former 500 Startups partners.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Will new SEC equity crowdfunding rules encourage more founders to pass the hat? — Companies can now raise $5 million via equity crowdfunding.

As tech stocks rally, bring on the IPOs — The Exchange has heard whispers that the late-November/early-December period could be active for new filings.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

CA ballot measure that keeps gig workers as independent contractors is projected to pass — Uber, Lyft, Instacart and DoorDash (the major backers of California’s Proposition 22) are getting their way.

Cannabis legalization measures set to pass in five states — Cannabis legalization was on five state ballots yesterday and ran the table.

Massachusetts voters pass a right-to-repair measure, giving them unprecedented access to their car data — Under the measure, once a person buys a vehicle, they own all of its data.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Read more

So Election Day is over, but the election continues.

The world’s attention has turned to a set of swing states still counting important mail-in votes, particularly Pennsylvania. So what exactly is happening today? How are counts happening? Is the election fair and secure?

“I urge everyone to remain patient,” Pennsylvania secretary of state Kathy Boockvar said in a press conference today, “We are going to accurately count every single ballot.” 

“The vote count, as I’ve said many times, is never done on the day of election night. The counties are doing this accurately as quickly as they possibly can.”

Across the state, mail-in ballots postmarked on or before Election Day are still arriving—don’t forget there have been significant postal delays—and so counting continues. The Republican state legislature declined to change Pennsylvania law, which meant that processing of over 2.5 million mail-in votes could not begin until Tuesday morning. Other states started the process much earlier.

“The practical labor associated with mail-in ballots has more steps than in-person voting,” says Eddie Perez, a Texas-based election administration expert with the nonpartisan OSET Institute. But, he adds, “Both in human and technology features, there’s a lot of safeguards for mail-in ballots.”

Here’s a concise but thorough rundown of the counting, security, and integrity process right now in Pennsylvania:

  • Ballots and envelopes were sent out only to registered and verified voters who requested them.
  • Election officials receive the ballot and envelope within three days of Election Day—although this deadline may be challenged by Republicans.
  • Officials verify that each ballot is associated with the exact eligible voter on the rolls.
  • Ballots are validated with voter records in exactly the same way as in-person votes.
  • To prevent fraud, each ballot and envelope has computer-readable codes and precise physical features like style, size, weight, and design that allow the computers to associate them with specific elections, precincts, content, and additional validation information.
  • Signatures on the ballot envelopes are matched against a central database by bipartisan teams.
  • Envelopes are opened and paperwork removed in a specific and legally mandated procedure.
  • Ballots that fail to pass these security measures are sent for further investigation, or for follow-up with the voter.

Decades of history, independent study, and these extra security steps explain why mail-in ballots are not easily susceptible to fraud, and why attempts to paint them as such are baseless disinformation, a false narrative propagated first and foremost by the president of the United States. In decades of increasing mail-in voting around the United States, widespread fraud has been nonexistent.

The Trump campaign, having now lost in the key swing state of Wisconsin, has said it will sue in Michigan and Pennsylvania to stop the ongoing counting of ballots, while falsely claiming victory even as many votes still remain uncounted. Votes counted earlier in the process favor Trump, while the mail-in votes from Democratic areas that are still being counted are expected to favor Biden. 

The counting in Pennsylvania could carry on through Friday.

There is one more scenario to address. Pennsylvania automatically recounts votes if the result is within 0.5%. A loser can request and pay for a recount by going to court and alleging errors in the vote count.

So far there is no reason to believe any such errors have occurred, but as has been said so many times, there is still a long way to go in Pennsylvania—and that means there may still be a long way to go for everyone.

This is an excerpt from The Outcome, our daily email on election integrity and security. Click here to get regular updates straight to your inbox.

Read more

As the US election process wore on from Tuesday evening into Wednesday, multiple counties across the country are broadcasting the ballot counting process.

What it is: Given the closeness of the election, it’s not surprising that voters and candidates alike are nervous about how votes are being tallied. So officials across the country have taken a note from Twitch and Instagram by installing a camera in ballot counting rooms and livestreaming the whole thing. The hope is to combat allegations of possible fraud.

What are these livestreams like? Think less Twitch stream, more store surveillance video. The quality is often grainy, the audio is on mute, and the streams are, frankly, quite boring to watch. Many cities have opted for YouTube as their platform. Here’s what it looks like in Los Angeles:

Denver’s camera offers aerial shots of multiple areas:

Not all livestreams are on YouTube. Several municipalities have opted for home surveillance cameras; Arizona’s hotly watched Maricopa County uses Google’s Nest to keep an eye on the counting (you can watch here). Washington’s King County installed cameras not too different from store surveillance equipment (you can watch here). And Union County in New Jersey uses the Angelcam app, a cloud surveillance tool (you can watch here).

Arizona is a peek into the future of livestreaming vote counts. In 2019, Arizona’s state legislature passed a law that required election officials to “provide for a live video recording of the custody of all ballots while the ballots are present in a tabulation room in the counting center.”

Panda cam, this is not. While zoo livestreams have gained popularity as calming, escapist windows of cuteness, there are higher stakes here. Sure, watching election officials sift through and sort ballots might be some people’s definition of “soothing,” but the purpose—being transparent and ensuring the validity and accuracy of election results—is very different, and perhaps more nail-biting than comforting for viewers.

Why is it important? Vote tabulation was rarely considered something the public had to see, but during this year’s contentious election, voters and politicos alike worry about fraud to the extent that the authenticity of every vote and counting process is under scrutiny. (It bears repeating: studies have repeatedly shown that voter fraud is nearly nonexistent.) Election officials are hoping that these livestreams will ensure voter confidence and counter any fraud allegations.

Philadelphia is ground zero for vote livestreaming: In late October, the Trump campaign was shown to be engaging in voter intimidation in the city by videotaping voters as they dropped off their ballots at designated centers. Trump exacerbated the situation by suggesting that “bad things happen” in Philadelphia. The stakes were upped last Wednesday, when the Supreme Court ruled that mail-in ballots would count so long as they were postmarked by Election Day, even if they arrived later. Philadelphia’s role in what’s arguably the most contested state in the country is huge: the city leans Democrat and could push the state’s electoral votes toward Biden. It’s no surprise, then, that Philadelphia became the focus of intense scrutiny.

The Office of Philadelphia’s City Commissioners went on the offense on Tuesday evening:

As of publication, the livestream was still going on, with thousands of watchers:

Don’t be surprised if you see vote count livestreams in 2022—and beyond. This year’s election was historic in expanding absentee and mail-in voting options, resulting in record turnout. Even when voters feel it’s safe to vote in person, mail-in and absentee options will probably be here to stay. Livestreams are a cheap, easy way to help fight allegations of voter fraud and might be a first step in ensuring transparent and fair elections, all from the comfort of your couch.

Read more

While the presidential election is still in the balance, several ballot initiatives with broad implications for how we use technology have passed.

Ballot initiatives pose questions to voters and can—if passed—create, amend, or repeal existing state laws. In total, there were 129 statewide ballot initiatives across the country in this presidential election, including many related to taxation and drug legalization.

Here’s a round-up of some of the initiatives on tech policy with broader national implications, and what they might mean for consumers, privacy, and corporations. We’ll update it as the passage of more such questions is confirmed over the next few days.

California: gig workers will not become employees 

Proposition 22 was easily approved by California voters, meaning that gig workers for apps like Lyft, Uber, and Doordash will not become employees of those companies. Instead they will remain independent contractors. This essentially overturns AB-5, passed last year, which would have given gig workers the same protections as other workers, like minimum wage, benefits, and compensation. The proposition also includes a provision that a majority in California’s senate is required to overturn it, making any changes very difficult. As Mary-Beth Moylan, a law professor at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, recently noted, it is more common for ballot initiatives to require a ¾ majority to pass, rather than ⅞. 

A consortium of tech companies, including Uber, Lyft, and Postmates, spent more than $200 million in support of it—the most spent on any California proposition. Their huge financial advantage was amplified by their access to in-app marketing, including messaging that suggested “Yes on 22” would protect workers. In contrast, the opposition, led by labor unions, raised just short of $20 million. 

Given the spending imbalance, the results were somewhat expected—and both the fundraising and the marketing may provide a playbook for future fights between tech companies and consumers. 

Also California: expanded privacy protections for consumers 

The “Consumer Personal Information Law and Agency Initiative,” a.k.a Proposition 24, also passed, adding more privacy protections for the state’s consumers. The proposition calls for creating a new enforcement agency for the state’s privacy laws, expanding the types of information that consumers can opt out of sharing with advertisers, and shifting the state “do not sell” provision to “do not sell and share.” 

The measure was actually a bit contentious among privacy rights groups, as we explained in advance of the vote:

“Consumers would still have to opt into the protections, rather than opt out, and companies would be allowed to charge more for goods and services to make up for revenue they lose by not getting to sell data. This could make it harder for low-income and other marginalized groups to exercise their privacy rights.” 

Massachusetts: a “right to repair” law for vehicles

Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly said yes to Question 1, “Amend the Right to Repair Law,” which will give car owners and independent mechanics greater access to wireless vehicle data. A similar law had passed in Massachusetts in 2013 that required diagnostic data to be shared with independent mechanics, but it did not cover wireless data, which has become more common in the seven years since. This law aimed to fill in that gap.  Its passage is a blow to the auto manufacturers that lobbied for a no vote. They argued that this change would not give them enough time to protect cars’ security systems against hacking. 

The law will apply to cars made from 2022 on, and it is likely that it won’t just affect Massachusetts. Auto firms, like other consumer product companies, tend to match the highest regulatory standards set by states.

Michigan: electronic data is protected from unreasonable search

Michigan’s Proposition 22, which requires a search warrant for electronic and data and communications, will pass with wide margins. A number of states have already passed similar legislation protecting electronic data, including Missouri and New Hampshire. 

And here’s one that didn’t pass: 

California: courts will revert back to cash bail over risk assessment

California’s Proposition 25, which would have upheld SB10, a bill that replaced the cash bail system with criminal risk-assessment tools, will not pass by a more than 10-percentage point margin. It revisits a highly contentious and perennial debate in criminal justice reform that has been playing out across the country.

The question at hand is whether risk-assessment algorithms are a more just method over cash bail for deciding which defendants should be kept in jail before trial. Cash bail, which requires defendants to pay a sum of money set by a judge in order to be released, has been shown to discriminate against low-income individuals. Risk-assessment algorithms, by contrast, use historical data to predict the likelihood a defendant would reoffend during their pretrial period, and decide whether to jail or release them based on that probability.

While some argue that this offers a more “objective” alternative to cash bail, however, research has shown that such algorithms are also discriminatory—both against low-income people and against Black people who are disproportionately represented in the incarcerated population. It’s also hard for a defendant or lawyer to contest their decisions.

SB10 originally passed in 2018 and went into effect in 2019, making California the first state to abolish cash bail in favor of risk assessments. The decision generated heavy controversy, leading to the introduction of Prop 25 on this year’s ballot. A No on Prop 25 now repeals the bill, sending an interesting signal to jurisdictions around the country: cash bail may still be a discriminatory system, but replacing it with a discriminatory algorithm is not the answer.

Update Nov 4, 2020, 2:50pm ET: California’s Prop 25 was added to the story. More updates will be added as other ballot measures are confirmed.

Read more

Fast radio bursts are among the strangest mysteries in space science. These pulses last less than five milliseconds but release more energy than the sun does in days or weeks. Since they were first recorded in 2001 (and written about in 2007), scientists have discovered dozens of FRBs. Most are one-off signals, but a few repeat, including one that beats at a regular tempo

But no one has ever been able to explain what exactly produces FRBs. Before now, only five had been localized to specific regions in space, and they all originated outside our galaxy. When a signal comes from so far away, it’s very hard to find the object responsible for producing it. Most theories have focused on cosmic collisions or neutron stars. And also, well, aliens

Spoiler alert: it’s not aliens. Two new studies published in Nature today strongly suggest that magnetars—highly magnetized neutron stars—are one source of FRBs. The studies also indicate that these bursts are probably much more common than we imagined. 

“I don’t think we can conclude that all fast radio bursts come from magnetars, but for sure models that suggest magnetars as an origin for fast radio bursts are very probable,” says Daniele Michilli, an astrophysicist from McGill University and a coauthor of the first Nature study

The new findings focus on an FRB detected on April 28 by two telescopes: CHIME (the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, based in British Columbia) and STARE2 (an array of three small radio antennas located throughout California and Utah). The signal, dubbed FRB 200428, released more energy in radio waves in one millisecond than the sun does in 30 seconds. 

It’s par for the course for CHIME to find FRBs—it’s found dozens, and in the future the telescope might be able to detect a burst every day. But even though STARE2 was specifically designed to look for FRBs within the galaxy, at lower sensitivities than most other instruments, few expected it to succeed. When it became operational last year, the team predicted a 10% chance it would actually find a signal in the Milky Way. 

Then—it happened. “When I first looked at the data for the first time, I froze,” says Christopher Bochenek, a Caltech graduate student in astronomy, who leads the STARE2 project and is the lead author of the second Nature study. “It took me a few minutes to collect myself and make a call to a friend to actually sit down and make sure this thing was actually real.” Between STARE2 and CHIME, this burst was seen by five radio telescopes across North America. 

Those observations just happened to coincide with an incredibly bright flash emanating from a highly magnetized neutron star—a magnetar—called SGR J1935+2154, which was located 30,000 light-years from Earth near the center of the Milky Way galaxy. 

This magnetar, which is about 40 to 50 times more massive than the sun, produces intense bouts of electromagnetic radiation, including x-rays and gamma rays. Its magnetic fields are so strong that they squish nearby atoms into pencil-like shapes. 

Magnetars have always been a suspected source of FRBs, but it’s been difficult for astrophysicists to confirm this, since all other signals came from outside of the Milky Way. 

Researchers compared the radio waves of FRB 200428 with x-ray observations made by six space telescopes, as well as other ground-based observatories. Those x-ray emissions pointed to SGR J1935+2154, which flashed 3,000 times brighter than any other magnetar on record. 

The CHIME and STARE2 teams deduced that this particular magnetar was responsible for the energetic event that produced not only the bright x-ray emissions but FRB 200428 as well. It’s the first time such a burst has ever been discovered inside the Milky Way, and this FRB emits more energy than any other source of radio waves detected in the galaxy. 

FRB 200428 is only a 30th as strong as the weakest extra-galactic FRB on record, and one-thousandth the strength of the average signal. So the fact that STARE2 recorded it after just about a year in operation is a strong indication that these signals are bouncing around the galaxy more frequently than scientists realized. 

A counterpoint to these new findings comes from FAST, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, located in southwest China. FAST is the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world. It can’t survey large swaths of the sky, but it can peer narrowly to look for faint signals in places very far away.

FAST studied SGR J1935+2154 for a total of eight hours across four observational sessions from April 16 to 29, according to a third Nature study. And it found no radio waves that coincided with any known x-ray or gamma-ray bursts that happened during that time. 

That report doesn’t necessarily nix the magnetar explanation, especially since FAST wasn’t observing during the moment that FRB 200428 was detected. But it does suggest that a magnetar emitting an FRB, if confirmed, is a very rare event, and one that produces radio signals we have yet to fully characterize.

Sandro Mereghetti, an astronomer with the National Institute of Astrophysics in Milan, helped lead the SGR J1935+2154 x-ray detections made by the European Space Agency’s INTEGRAL telescope (International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory). Though he believes the discovery “strongly favors the class of FRB models based on magnetars,” he points out that “the particular physical processes leading to the observed bursts of radio and hard x-ray emission are not settled yet.” In other words, we don’t know what exactly happens inside a magnetar that would produce FRBs along with associated x rays or gamma rays. 

“I would not say that the mystery of FRBs has been solved,” says Mereghetti. “But this is certainly a big step forward that also opens prospects for other similar detections.”

Read more

In a move that everyone knew was coming, President Trump announced in a speech at 2:21 a.m. EST this morning that he had won—long before enough votes were in to make that call. “We were getting ready to win this election,” he said. “Frankly, we did win the election.” He called for the counting of votes to stop and the outcome to be put into the hands of the Supreme Court. Social media companies anticipated such a move—so how did they react to stop such lies from spreading? Despite months of preparation, their performance was mixed. 

No winner: With mail-in votes still being counted and legal battles looming, it may take days before a clear winner can be decided. Even longtime Trump allies condemned his lie. Chris Christie, former governor of New Jersey and Trump cheerleader, criticized the speech in an interview with ABC: “It’s a bad strategic decision. It’s a bad political decision.” Chris Wallace, a host on Trump’s favorite TV network, Fox News, said: “This is an extremely flammable situation and the president just threw a match into it. He hasn’t won these states.”

Platform policies: Stung by their mishandling of misinformation in 2016, platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have adopted a raft of last-minute policies for this election designed to limit people’s ability to see and amplify false or misleading posts. Chief among these is labeling such posts and restricting people’s ability to share them.

Flagging posts: A couple of hours before his speech, Trump tweeted the false assertion that Democrats were stealing the election: “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” Facebook and Twitter both flagged this post as being misleading; Twitter hid it from view and disabled replies and likes. After Trump’s speech, Facebook and Instagram also added a generic note to their platforms saying that votes were still being counted and that the winner of the election had not yet been projected. Facebook also added a label to the video of the speech itself that reads: “Final results may be different from initial vote counts, as ballot counting will continue for days or weeks after polls close.”

Free to view: And yet elsewhere the full video of Trump’s speech is still up for anybody to watch, without sanction. On Twitter, it sits on Trump’s timeline right above his earlier hidden post about election stealing. This raises questions about tech companies’ ability to react as quickly to video content as they seem to be doing to text. According to the Washington Post, Twitter says that the video does not violate its policies. In comparison, some television networks, such as NBC News, cut Trump off mid-speech as soon as he started lying about winning. Anchor Savannah Guthrie said: “We’ve got to dip in here because there’ve been several statements that are just frankly not true.” 

Today and for days to come, there will be more lies and deliberate attempts to mislead US voters and election followers around the world. For all their hand-wringing and talk, tech companies still aren’t on top of the misinformation problem. They need to step up.

Read more

Want to repost and reshare your Instagram content? Wondering how to reshare (regram) Instagram posts without using third-party tools? In this article, you’ll discover in-app features that let you reshare Instagram feed posts, stories, IGTV, and reels. You’ll also find tips to obtain permission to reshare Instagram content legally. To learn how to repost images […]

The post How to Repost Instagram Feed Posts, Stories, IGTV, and Reels appeared first on Social Media Examiner | Social Media Marketing.

Read more
1 2,605 2,606 2,607 2,608 2,609 2,685