The NSA’s SKYNET program may be killing thousands of innocent people →

Last year, The Intercept published documents detailing the NSA's SKYNET programme. According to the documents, SKYNET engages in mass surveillance of Pakistan's mobile phone network, and then uses a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 million people to try and rate each person's likelihood of being a terrorist.
Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA's methods as "ridiculously optimistic" and "completely bullshit." A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET's machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.
Somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 people have been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, and most of them were classified by the US government as "extremists," the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported. Based on the classification date of "20070108" on one of theSKYNET slide decks (which themselves appear to date from 2011 and 2012), the machine learning program may have been in development as early as 2007.
In the years that have followed, thousands of innocent people in Pakistan may have been mislabelled as terrorists by that "scientifically unsound" algorithm, possibly resulting in their untimely demise.

Disparity in Life Spans of the Rich and the Poor Is Growing →

Some people talk about raising retirement ages for payouts from social security because the average person is living longer, but they're missing the fact that those who rely on social security the most aren't.

The poor are losing ground not only in income, but also in years of life, the most basic measure of well-being. In the early 1970s, a 60-year-old man in the top half of the earnings ladder could expect to live 1.2 years longer than a man of the same age in the bottom half, according to an analysis by theSocial Security Administration. Fast-forward to 2001, and he could expect to live 5.8 years longer than his poorer counterpart.
New research released on Friday contains even more jarring numbers. Looking at the extreme ends of the income spectrum, economists at the Brookings Institution found that for men born in 1920, there was a six-year difference in life expectancy between the top 10 percent of earners and the bottom 10 percent. For men born in 1950, that difference had more than doubled, to 14 years.
For women, the gap grew to 13 years, from 4.7 years.

Gravitational Waves Exist: The Inside Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them →

Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons, in a sort of mating dance, gathering pace with each orbit, hurtling closer and closer. By the time they were a few hundred miles apart, they were whipping around at nearly the speed of light, releasing great shudders of gravitational energy. Space and time became distorted, like water at a rolling boil. In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined. They formed a new black hole, sixty-two times as heavy as our sun and almost as wide across as the state of Maine. As it smoothed itself out, assuming the shape of a slightly flattened sphere, a few last quivers of energy escaped. Then space and time became silent again...

And now we're learning to listen to the universe.

UK politicians green-light plans to record every citizen's internet history →

Surveillance legislation proposed by the UK last November has been examined in detail by the country's politicians, with a new report recommending 86 alterations, but broadly approving the powers requested by the government. The parliamentary committee scrutinizing the draft Investigatory Powers Bill said that companies like Apple and Facebook should not be required to decrypt messages sent on their services, but approved plans to record every UK citizen's browsing history for 12 months. The committee also gave a thumbs up to the bulk retention of data, and the targeted hacking of individuals' computers, known as "equipment interference."
...The Bill has been attacked by ISPs, privacy advocates, the UN, and the world's largest tech companies, with critics agreeing that the Bill is being rushed into law and that its wording is confusing. Critics point to portions of the law like the statement that "data includes any information that is not data." The UK's home secretary and the Bill's principal architect, Theresa May, later explainedthat this was supposed to refer to things like paper.

Whether or not the language is clarified, we're slowly moving to a world where everything we do may be known by everyone else. Governments will only be the first to afford mass surveillance technology.

President Obama's budget calls for a new wage insurance program. Here's what that means. →

The basic theory of wage insurance is that this could be a natural expansion of the existing social insurance state, which currently helps people out in the case of illness, disability, retirement, or temporary unemployment. But what the current system doesn't do much is help people or communities hit by the inevitable ups and downs of structural economic change.

The current unemployment insurance system implicitly imagines a world of generic workers, generic companies, and generic skills. You're minding your business, and then — bam — unexpectedly the company you work for shuts down. Now you're out of a job for a bit, and you need some money to help keep you afloat while you look for new work. Soon enough, you get a new position at a new company doing similar work for similar money.

Of course, that does happen, which is why unemployment insurance exists in the first place, but there are lots of people who lose their jobs and then can't find similar work at similar pay.

My mother, for example, was an analog-era page designer for magazines, and when the world shifted to digital desktop publishing software her years of skills and experience were substantially devalued. Factories leave a town and never come back. Often, workers left behind by these kinds of changes turn to lower-paid, lower-skilled jobs.