The Daily Populous

Bill Gates donates $4M to create mosquitoes that kill each other using sex

Microsoft founder Bill Gates is pouring £3 million ($4 million) into a project to create killer mosquitoes that destroy each other through sex.

It's a bold bid to curb malaria, a deadly disease typically transmitted through the bite of infected mosquitoes.

Tech mogul Gates will use funds from his own charity organization – the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – to eradicate malaria "within a generation.".

The plan is to create genetically modified male mosquitoes that mate with their female counterparts in the wild.

Only female mosquitoes bite, so Gates' army of gene-engineered male mosquitoes would be safe to humans.

What's important is that these male mosquitoes contain a self-limiting gene that gets passed onto female mates.

Mosquitoes only start biting people once they're adults, so given enough time, the danger of blood-sucking female mosquitoes could be eradicated. »

Amazon Workers Demand Jeff Bezos Cancel Face Recognition Contracts With Law Enforcement

Authored by gizmodo.com

Following employee protests at Google and Microsoft over government contracts, workers at Amazon are circulating an internal letter to CEO Jeff Bezos, asking him to stop selling the company’s Rekognition facial recognition software to law enforcement and to boot the data-mining firm Palantir from its cloud services.

Earlier this week, Microsoft employees called on the company to cancel its cloud computing contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Implement strong transparency and accountability measures, that include enumerating which law enforcement agencies and companies supporting law enforcement agencies are using Amazon services, and how. »

Jogger accidentally crosses U.S. border from B.C., gets detained for 2 weeks

Authored by cbc.ca

She turned around to head back — and that's when she was apprehended by two U.S. border patrol officers.

"An officer stopped me and started telling me I had crossed the border illegally," she told CBC News.

Looking southeast along the beach in Surrey, B.C., that crosses the U.S. border. »

Supreme Court restricts police on cellphone location data

Authored by reuters.com

Roberts stressed that the ruling did not resolve other hot-button digital privacy fights, including whether police need warrants to access real-time cellphone location information to track criminal suspects.

The ruling has no bearing on “traditional surveillance techniques” such as security cameras or on data collection for national security purposes, he added.

A person walks with an umbrella prior to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to impose limits on the ability of police to obtain cellphone data pinpointing the past location of criminal suspects, outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, U.S., June 22, 2018. »