Good morning! Today: the preparations for a mission to deflect an asteroid, the disinformation campaigns targeting Latinx voters, and live facial recognition is tracking kids in Buenos Aires suspected of being criminals. Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day. | This spacecraft is being readied for a one-way mission to deflect an asteroid
In a clean room in Building 23 at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, a spacecraft called DART was splayed open like a fractured, cubic egg. An instrument called a star tracker—which will, once DART is in deep space, ascertain which way is up—was mounted to the core, along with batteries and a variety of other sensors. The avionics system, DART’s central computer, was prominently attached to square, precision-machined panels that will form the sides, once the spacecraft is folded up. Wires ran from the computer to the radio system that DART will use to communicate with Earth. Gyroscopes and antennas were exposed. In a room next door, an experimental thruster system called NEXT-C was waiting its turn. Great bundles of thick tendrils wrapped in silver insulation hung down from the spacecraft and ran along the floor to the control room, where they connected to a towering battery of testbed computers operated by four engineers. A clock over one of the computers read, “Days to DART Launch: 350:08:33.” DART—the Double Asteroid Redirection Test—is designed to crash into an asteroid called Dimorphos. The impact will change Dimorphos’s speed by about one millimeter per second, or one five-hundredth of a mile per hour. Though Dimorphos is not about to collide with Earth, DART is intended to demonstrate the ability to deflect an asteroid like it that is headed our way, should one ever be discovered. Since a Soviet probe called Luna 1 became the first spacecraft to escape Earth’s orbit on January 2, 1959, humanity has sent about 250 probes into the solar system. DART is unique among them. It is the first that sets out not to study the solar system, but to change it. Read the full story. —David W. Brown
| | “It’s been really, really bad”: How Latinx voters are being targeted by disinformation 2020 might be the first election in which the Latinx voting block will represent the largest group of minority voters, with 32 million eligible citizens. Many of the states which have the largest Hispanic populations are considered battlegrounds—including New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, Florida and Nevada—and in other close-run states such as North Carolina and Pennsylvania, Latino votes could provide a “critical boost” to tight races. With so much at stake, money and information are being poured into those communities to try and sway the vote, and it’s happening especially on social media, where an array of sophisticated micro-targeted messages are focused on changing the minds of Latinx voters—or persuading them not to vote at all. Read the full story. —Tate Ryan-Moseley | Live facial recognition is tracking kids suspected of being criminals What’s going on: In a national database in Argentina, tens of thousands of entries detail the names, birthdays, and national IDs of people suspected of crimes. The database, known as the Consulta Nacional de Rebeldías y Capturas (National Register of Fugitives and Arrests), or CONARC, began in 2009 as a part of an effort to improve law enforcement for serious crimes. Now a new investigation from Human Rights Watch has found that not only are children regularly added to CONARC, but the database also powers a live facial recognition system in Buenos Aires deployed by the city government. This makes the system likely the first known instance of its kind being used to hunt down kids suspected of criminal activity. Worrying developments: The system has since led to numerous false arrests (links in Spanish), which the police have no established protocol for handling. There seems to be no mechanism to be able to correct mistakes in either the algorithm or the database. It’s deeply concerning, but adding children to the equation makes matters that much worse. Read the full story. —Karen Hao | | The top ten must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 The world recorded more than 1 million covid-19 cases in three days An ominous milestone. ( NYT $) + Trump’s doctor says the president is no longer infectious. ( NYT $) + England is getting a new set of rules for local lockdowns. ( BBC) + Resistance to restrictions is rising in Europe as caseloads spike again. ( NYT $) 2 A major online learning platform was created by a religious cult Just when you thought 2020 couldn’t get any weirder. ( OneZero) 3 Twitter introduced a broad sweep of measures to limit election abuse Retweeting is temporarily unavailable, and posts claiming premature victory will be limited. ( WP $) + There’s a serious case to be made for putting Trump’s tweets on a time delay. ( Wired $) 4 Congress made a lousy case for breaking up Big Tech Here’s one view on what regulators should do instead. ( TR) + “Too complex to break up” is the new “too big to fail.” ( WSJ $) + Regulating Big Tech is going to be a long, hard slog. ( The Economist $) + The Feds are eyeing the Chrome browser for breakup. ( Politico) 5 Election result delays mean “the system is working,” says cybersecurity chief We should prepare for a flood of disinformation before, during, and after election day. ( TR) + America’s rural postal offices are under threat. ( National Geographic) + The common mail voting mistakes you should avoid. ( Axios) 6 Pakistan has banned TikTok 📵 Its telecoms authority said some of the videos on the app are “immoral and indecent.” ( TechCrunch) + Faith in government drops when mobile internet arrives. ( The Economist $) + Meet the Idaho potato worker who made the TikTok video that sent Fleetwood Mac sales soaring. ( NPR) 7 QAnon has a big following in Germany This is deeply ominous. ( NYT $) + QAnon is tearing families apart. ( WP $) + A “QAnon candidate” in Georgia looks set to win a seat in Congress. ( New Yorker $) + Meet the member of Congress trying to take on QAnon. ( Recode) 8 Schools don’t seem to be superspreading 🏫 The risk isn’t zero, but it’s smaller than people had forecast during the summer. ( The Atlantic) + How one man went from denying to contracting to spreading covid-19 to his family. ( WP $) 9 AI is listening in to sales calls 📞 And it’s taking notes, transcribing calls and offering suggestions. ( Wired $) 10 Influencers are unionizing The industry can and does exploit workers, many of them young women. ( The Guardian) | | “The name is ruined. They’ll tear it down and build high-rises.” —A security guard at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where the virus is thought to have originated, tells the New Yorker what he thinks its fate will be. | | | | | |
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