A new startup called Zunum Aero is aiming to reinvent how users travel short distances, such as from San Francisco to Los Angeles. "The Kirkland, Washington-based company [...] plans to build a fleet of hybrid electric jets to sell to major carriers for service on densely traveled regional routes like San Francisco to Los Angeles or Boston to Washington, DC, "reports The Verge. Two aviation giants, Boeing and JetBlue, are reportedly backing the startup. From the report: Lower operating costs (i.e., no fueling) will allow carriers to reduce fares by 40 to 80 percent, they predict. And by flying a smaller aircraft that would be subject to fewer TSA regulations, Zunum claims it will take less time to go through security before boarding one of its planes. Zunum aims to build several models of hybrid-electric propulsion jets. At launch, its first class of aircraft will be tiny, in the 10-15 foot range, with a 10-passenger capacity and a range of up to 700 miles on a single charge. (Think San Francisco to Portland or Atlanta to DC.) Those planes can be expected to roll off the assembly line by the early 2020s, the company's CEO Ashish Kumar told The Verge. By the 2030s, as electric battery technology improves, Zunum hopes to build larger aircraft that can carry up to 50 passengers and travel up to 1,000 miles on a single charge. (Think Seattle to LA or Boston to Jacksonville, Florida.) Zunum's aircraft will feature hybrid electric motors with the capacity to accept recharging power from a variety of sources. Because airplanes are typically kept in service for up to 30 years, Kumar says its important for Zunum's aircraft to be future proof. That means designing them to be compatible with future battery designs and range-extending generators, with an eye toward ultimately switching from hybrid propulsion to fully electric motors once the technology catches up.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: The RCMP for the first time is publicly confirming it uses cellphone surveillance devices in investigations across Canada -- but at the same time says the potential of unauthorized snooping in Ottawa, as reported by CBC News, poses a threat to national security. The RCMP held the briefing in the wake of a CBC News investigation that found evidence that devices known as IMSI catchers may be in use near government buildings in Ottawa for the purpose of illegal spying. After shrouding their own use of the technology in secrecy for years, the RCMP took the unprecedented step of speaking publicly about the devices -- also known as Stingrays or Mobile Device Identifiers (MDIs) -- to address public concern amidst mounting questions about their use. The RCMP says that MDIs -- of which it owns 10 -- have become "vital tools" deployed scores of times to identify and track mobile devices in 19 criminal investigations last year and another 24 in 2015. [RCMP Chief Supt. Jeff Adam] says in all cases but one in 2016, police got warrants. The one exception was an exigent circumstance -- in other words, an emergency scenario "such as a kidnapping," said Adam, whose office tracks every instance where an MDI has been used by the RCMP. He says using an MDI requires senior police approval as well as getting a judge's order. And he says the technology provides only a first step in an investigation allowing officers to identify a device. He says only then can police apply for additional warrants to obtain a user's "basic subscriber information" such as name and address connected to the phone. Then, he says, only if the phone and suspect are targets of the investigation can police seek additional warrants to track the device or conduct a wiretap to capture communications. Adam says the RCMP currently has 24 technicians trained and authorized to deploy the devices across Canada. He knows other police forces own and use them too, but declined to name them.

AmiMoJo writes from a report via BBC: Following two years of trials of the world's first electric car ferry, named Ampere, Norwegian ferry operators are busy making the transition from diesel. It is thought that 84 ferries are ripe for conversion to electric power, and 43 ferries on longer routes would benefit from conversion to hybrids that use diesel engines to charge their batteries. If this were done, nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions would be cut by 8,000 tons per year and CO2 emissions by 300,000 tons per year, equivalent to the annual emissions from 150,000 cars. The Ampere uses an 800kWh battery, equivalent to 8 high end Tesla cars. According to a report from Siemens and environmental campaign group Bellona, long-distance ferries are not well suited to electrification, but about 70% of Norway's ferries cover relatively short crossings, so switching to electric power would pay for itself in a few years. The BBC report also mentions some of the challenges associated with converting the diesel ferries to electric ferries. For example, "during initial trials, the fast charging placed excessive strain on the local grid, designed as it was to service a relatively small population," reports BBC. "To lighten the load, high-capacity batteries were put on constant charge on either side of the fjord, ready to transfer the electricity quickly to the ferry's batteries whilst docked."

In late February, YouTube unveiled its live TV service called YouTube TV, which offers live TV streaming over the internet for $35 per month with no long-term contract required. The company has officially launched the service today in five select markets: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, and Philadelphia. YouTube says that more markets are coming soon, however, details on when/where are scarce. PhoneDog reports: A membership to YouTube TV costs $35 per month and includes live streaming of channels like ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, ESPN, and others. Subscribers also get an unlimited cloud DVR for recording shows that'll last up to nine months, and six accounts that each get their own recommendations and cloud DVRs. YouTube is offering a free one-month trial of YouTube TV so that everyone can give it a try. After your first paid month, YouTube will give you a Google Chromecast to thank you for sticking with the service. Source: YouTube Official Blog

Xiaomi says it's misunderstood. Once compared with Apple for its sleek smartphones and charismatic leadership, the Chinese startup is seeking an image makeover as it tries to recover from a sales-growth slide. From a report: And the brand its billionaire co-founder Lei Jun wants to be compared with: Costco Wholesale Corp., the Issaquah, Washington-based warehouse retailer that sells everything from wine and diamond rings to bulging boxes of cereal and fruit at knockdown prices. Xiaomi's revenue will probably reach $15 billion this year as the Beijing-based maker of products ranging from pens and air purifiers to TVs and smartphones adopts a new business model and fine-tunes operations, Lei, 47, said in a recent interview. "We are not Apple," Lei, clad in a black polo shirt and blue jeans, said at Xiaomi's Bengaluru office in India, its biggest overseas market. "We have the same value system as Costco. We want users to enjoy better products at an affordable price."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Taser, the company whose electronic stun guns have become a household name, is now offering a groundbreaking deal to all American law enforcement: free body cameras and a year's worth of access to the company's cloud storage service, Evidence.com. In addition, on Wednesday, the company also announced that it would be changing its name to "Axon" to reflect the company's flagship body camera product. Right now, Axon is the single largest vendor of body cameras in America. It vastly outsells smaller competitors, including VieVu and Digital Ally -- the company has profited $90 million from 2012 through 2016. If the move is successful, Axon could quickly crowd out its rivals entirely. In recent years, federal dollars went to police agencies both big (Los Angeles) and small (Village of Spring Valley, New York), encouraging the purchase of body-worn cameras. However, while cameras are rapidly spreading across America, they are still not ubiquitous yet. Axon wants to change that. "Only 20 percent [of cops] have a camera," Rick Smith, the company's CEO, told Ars. "Eighty percent are going out with a gun and no camera. We only need 20- to 30-percent conversion to make it profitable," he added. "We expect 80 percent to become customers." "Our belief is that a body camera is to a cop what a smartphone is to a civilian," Smith said. "Cops spend about two-thirds of their time doing paperwork. We believe, within 10 years, we can automate police reporting. We can effectively triple the world's police force." The offer is only available to American law enforcement, but Smith said the company would consider foreign agencies on a case-by-case basis.

Uber said today that it had found one of the documents Waymo alleges was stolen by a former employee -- who left its self-driving car effort to join Uber's -- on the employee's personal computer. From a report on TechCrunch: The document was found on a personal device belonging to Sameer Kshirsagar, Uber's attorney Arturo Gonzalez said at a court hearing today. It's the first time that Uber has acknowledged that any of Waymo's documents are in the possession of any Uber employees. However, Uber emphasized that the document was not found on Uber's computers. "We did collect documents from him and thus far we have only found one document from his computers that matches the documents identified in the complaint," Gonzalez said. Waymo claims that Kshirsagar downloaded several confidential documents in June 2016, one month before resigning and joining Anthony Levandowski at Uber. The names of the five specific documents are partially redacted in court filings, but one references "laser questions" and another "lens placement."

Reader Freshly Exhumed writes: Nicholas Deleon at Motherboard reveals a run-in with scammers who are already hard at work taking advantage of newly signed legislation that allows Internet Service Providers to sell your online privacy, including your web browser history, to the highest bidder without your consent. Relatedly, Tim Berners-Lee would prefer people to protest in the streets rather than take technical measures such as TOR and VPN. For those intent on using VPN, TorrentFreak has their latest reviews of VPN anonimity practices, with the caveat that the info is submitted by the VPN companies themselves on a "trust us" basis.

Four years ago, Google was faced with a conundrum: if all its users hit its voice recognition services for three minutes a day, the company would need to double the number of data centers just to handle all of the requests to the machine learning system powering those services, reads a PCWorld article, which talks about how Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a chip that is designed to accelerate the inference stage of deep neural networks came into being. The article shares an update: Google published a paper on Wednesday laying out the performance gains the company saw over comparable CPUs and GPUs, both in terms of raw power and the performance per watt of power consumed. A TPU was on average 15 to 30 times faster at the machine learning inference tasks tested than a comparable server-class Intel Haswell CPU or Nvidia K80 GPU. Importantly, the performance per watt of the TPU was 25 to 80 times better than what Google found with the CPU and GPU.

Reader BrianFagioli writes: Today, the company admits that it is throwing in the towel on Unity, as well as its vision for convergence with devices like phones and tablets. Starting with Ubuntu 18.04, the wonderful GNOME will once again become the default desktop environment! "We are wrapping up an excellent quarter and an excellent year for the company, with performance in many teams and products that we can be proud of. As we head into the new fiscal year, it's appropriate to reassess each of our initiatives. I'm writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS," says Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu and Canonical.

An anonymous reader shares a TechCrunch report: According to a new study involving more than 120,000 job offers transacted on Hired, a jobs marketplace for tech workers, the average female candidate is still making less than her male peers for the same work, and sometimes far less. Hired's data shows that 63 percent of the time women receive lower salary offers than men for the same job at the same company, with white women offered 4 percent less on average, and women more broadly offered up to 50 percent less in the most extreme examples. Along the same vein, for one out of every 10 job openings that Hired analyzed, companies offered white men salaries that were at least 20 percent higher than those offered to women. According to the American Association of University Women, it might take another 136 years for the pay gap to disappear entirely. Perhaps more illuminating in this new report is what happens to women's salaries over time, and who is receiving the lowest pay of all for the same jobs at the same companies: Latina and black women. [...] It found that white women with four years or less of experience actually ask for more money than their male counterparts -- possibly because they're armed with information about what the market is paying for more entry-level jobs. A gap in the other direction begins to appear in candidates with six or more years of experience, however, with white women in tech both asking for less than their white male counterparts and receiving it. Indeed, over time and across the country, white women in tech earn an average of .90 cents for every dollar made by their male peers for the same work.

In an op-ed published on the Washington Post, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and his counterpart at the FTC have argued that strict privacy rules for ISPs aren't necessary in part because the broadband market is more competitive than the search engine market. From a report on ArsTechnica: Internet users who have only one choice of high-speed home broadband providers would probably scoff at this claim. But an op-ed written by Pai and Acting FTC Chair Maureen Ohlhausen ignored the lack of competition in home Internet service, focusing only on the competitive wireless broadband market. Because of this competition, it isn't fair to impose different rules on ISPs than on websites, they wrote. "Others argue that ISPs should be treated differently because consumers face a unique lack of choice and competition in the broadband marketplace," Pai and Ohlhausen wrote in their op-ed. "But that claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny either. For example, according to one industry analysis, Google dominates desktop search with an estimated 81 percent market share (and 96 percent of the mobile search market), whereas Verizon, the largest mobile broadband provider, holds only an estimated 35 percent of its market." [...] Instead of addressing the lack of competition in home Internet service, Pai and Ohlhausen simply didn't mention it in their op-ed. But they argued that ISPs shouldn't face stricter privacy rules than search engines and other websites because of the level of competition in broadband and the amount of data companies like Google collect about Internet users. "As a result, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Congress decided to disapprove the FCC's unbalanced rules," they wrote. "Indeed, the FTC's criticism of the FCC's rules last year noted specifically that they 'would not generally apply to other services that collect and use significant amounts of consumer data.'"

Top presidential strategist Steve Bannon has been booted from the National Security Council amid a reshuffling of the key panel, Bloomberg reports Wednesday morning. President Donald Trump reorganized the council, removing Bannon and downgrading the role of his homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, the report added, citing multiple sources. From the report: Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, was elevated to the National Security Council's principals committee at the beginning of Trump's presidency. The move drew criticism from some members of Congress and Washington's foreign policy establishment. A White House official said that Bannon was placed on the committee in part to monitor Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and never attended a meeting. He's no longer needed with McMaster in charge of the council, the official said. Trump fired Flynn on Feb. 13 for not disclosing to the president or to Vice President Mike Pence the extent of his conversations with Russia's ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, before Trump's inauguration.

Infamous New Zealand-based internet mogul Kim Dotcom plans to launch a Bitcoin payments system for users to sell files and video streaming as he fights extradition to the United States for criminal copyright charges. From a report on Reuters: The German-born entrepreneur, who is wanted by U.S. law enforcement on copyright and money laundering allegations related to his now-defunct streaming site Megaupload, announced his new venture called 'Bitcontent' in a video posted on YouTube this week. "You can create a payment for any content that you put on the internet... you can share that with your customers, with the interest community and, boom, you are basically in business and can sell your content," Dotcom said in the video. He added that Bitcontent would eventually allow businesses, such as news organizations, to earn money from their entire websites. He did not provide a launch date. Dotcom did not provide details on how Bitcontent would differ from existing Bitcoin operations or how it would help news organizations make money beyond existing subscription payment options.