Also on today’s menu:
Pedestrian Dies After Being Struck By Train
Active-Shooter Detection Technology For Schools
Musk: Free Speech … As Long I Agree
Governor Chris Sununu issued an executive order to ban the use of the social media app TikTok on government-issued phones and laptops, saying it poses an “unacceptable level of cybersecurity risk to the state.” New Hampshire joins at least seven other states, including Maryland, Iowa, and Nebraska, in banning TikTok, and the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to seek a ban on the app’s use on federally-issued devices.
TikTok, a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has 92 million users in the United States who share pranks, stunts, and other recordings lasting from 15 seconds to 10 minutes, but FBI Director Christopher Wray warned a congressional committee that the app poses the danger of allowing the Chinese government to harvest user data and potentially control a user’s phone.
New Hampshire also will ban a number of other Chinese-based technologies from government phones and laptops, including Alibaba products and WeChat. The governor’s office said there are number of fake Sununu accounts, and that the state has reported fraudulent accounts “countless times.”
Pedestrian Dies After Being Struck By Train
Witnesses who saw a Downeaster train strike and kill a man on the tracks at Front Street in Exeter on December 15 told police it was an apparent suicide, something that police confirmed following their investigation.
First responders found the adult male, whose identity has not been released, dead at the scene.
Amtrak posted a statement on its website, reporting “train delay due to police activity in Exeter, NH.”
Active-Shooter Detection Technology For Schools
The Manchester School Board has approved the use of technology known as ShotSpotter and Fusus to share live video with police to alert authorities if a crime is being committed. ShotSpotter uses audio sensors atop light posts and buildings to triangulate the sound when a gun is fired to pinpoint the number of shots fired and their location. The data are filtered by machine algorithms to classify the sound as a potential gunshot. Acoustic experts in ShotSpotter’s Incident Review Center confirm that it is gunfire before contacting local police, which the company claims will take less than 60 seconds from the time of the shooting.
Manchester would be the first police department in the state to deploy the technology after receiving a $300,000 federal grant to cover the acquisition and implementation of ShotSpotter for a two-year trial across a three-square-mile section of Manchester.
School board members who supported the move cited a recent incident where at least nine schools across New Hampshire received fake active-shooter threats, disrupting the school day.
Musk: Free Speech … As Long I Agree
Free speech advocate Elon Musk has suspended the accounts of reporters with the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Voice of America, and other publications, several of whom had been writing about Musk’s rationale for imposing a new policy banning accounts that automatically tracked the flights of his private jet using publicly available data. He had claimed the policy was in response to a stalking incident in Los Angeles on Tuesday that affected his family.
Nellie Bowles of The Free Press (formerly Common Sense), which had been among a small group of reporters with whom Musk had shared a trove of emails from Twitter’s archives, wrote, “Whenever a source wants to dump documents in your hands, they have an agenda, and Musk is no exception. What was his? The archives show well-intentioned, power-high and pretty random progressives with unimaginable power—and they wielded it. … [Yet] If too much power was in the hands of a few people then, now it is in the hands of just one man, Elon Musk. And he is being driven by some of the same whims, just with new targets.”
Twitter’s co-founder and its former chief executive officer, Jack Dorsey, responding to the document dump showing that former Twitter executives had limited conversation about topics that did not fit their political agendas by creating rules they made up on the fly, wrote a mea culpa, saying, “The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves. This burdened the company with too much power...”
Bowles concluded, “Musk’s Twitter reign (of terror?!) is a developing story. I’m working on something longer. And we accept all document dumps from all agendas.”
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