Bytes: What’s new in tech
The treadmill video wars
NordicTrack is battling customers who hacked its treadmills to watch Netflix and take Zoom calls, said Matt Burgess in Wired.com. The best part of NordicTrack’s $4,000 X32i treadmill, some runners say, is its 32-inch highdefinition screen. The machine is designed to serve up the company’s own videos of exercise classes and running routes. But some users figured out they could override the software to access “the underlying Android operating system,” sideload apps, and even install thirdparty browsers to fire up videos they want to watch while exercising. NordicTrack began automatically updating its exercise equipment in October to block access to “privilege mode.” The move has put NordicTrack “at the center of the right-to-repair debate,” over how much control consumers should have over tech products they have purchased.
‘Super-recognizers’ vs. the machines
Tired of error-prone facial-recognition software, London’s Metropolitan Police has turned to a team of human “super-recognizers,” said Parmy Olson in Bloomberg.com. “A tiny team of London police” are considered elite “super-recognizers” with extraordinary skill at identifying people in a crowd. On a good week, each member of the team will positively identify 20 to 30 people on a certain watch list. Compare that with facial-recognition tech. Between 2016 and 2019, London’s police “conducted 10 trials of live face-matching software made by Japanese tech firm NEC with cameras mounted on surveillance vans and poles.” In those four years, the software made 42 total matches of individuals. Only eight of them were verified to be correct.
Splitting up the Pentagon’s JEDI
Amazon and Microsoft could wind up sharing the Pentagon’s new giant cloud-infrastructure project, said Jordan Novet in CNBC.com. This summer, the Defense Department scrapped plans for a contract with Microsoft, called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) agreement, after it became tangled up in legal challenges from Amazon, which argued that former President Trump sabotaged its bid. The U.S. General Services Administration said last week that the Pentagon this time “anticipates awarding two contracts” for a new effort, known as Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability. The U.S. solicited bids from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, but in the end only Amazon and Microsoft appear able to meet all of the Pentagon’s requirements.