2025 Edition
ISSN 0742-468XFederal Trade Commission settled its complaint against InMarket Media for tracking and selling consumers' precise location data for targeted advertising
According to the FTC's complaint, Texas-based InMarket offered two apps to consumers: shopping rewards app CheckPoints, and shopping list app ListEase. According to the FTC's press release, the FTC alleged in its complaint that when InMarket requested consent to use a consumer's location data, it told the customer that it was only using the data “for the' function, such as to provide shopping reward points or to remind consumers about items on their shopping list.” The FTC alleges that InMarket “fail[ed] to inform users that the location data will also be combined with other data obtained about those users and used for targeted advertising.”
Read full story at National Law Review…
The GIS Accelerator program is a five-day intensive course that introduces basic GIS skills to participants. The next cohort of the program started Jan. 6. [2025]
The Yale GIS Accelerator program — which aims to teach University affiliates how to utilize geographic information systems, or GIS, in projects — began on Jan. 6, 2025. It is a five-day intensive GIS instruction program led by Jill Kelly, a lecturer at the School of Public Health.
The program consists of lectures, demos, lab exercises and mentorship from GIS consultants to help participants properly visualize and analyze their spatial data. It does not require any prerequisites. Held biannually in January and June, the program offers a hybrid format for participants.
“Participants leave the program with basic GIS skills, at least one completed map of their project data, an understanding of the kinds of spatial analysis they could pursue next, and — we hope — an enthusiasm for further geospatial work,” Kelly told the News.
Read full story at Yale Daily News…
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has had good reason to ban drones from airport airspace, since the small vehicles could pose a danger to larger aircraft carrying people and cargo.
… Drones, often guided by high-fidelity location technology, make for impressive inspectors. In a groundbreaking move, the FAA recently authorized Delta Air Lines to be the first US commercial airline to deploy uncrewed aerial vehicles for maintenance inspections.
… Drones equipped with geographic information system (GIS) and AI technology are revolutionizing inspections in industries from insurance and utilities to forestry and construction. The drones are capturing imagery in hard-to-access places while smart systems analyze the findings.
The views afforded by a drone typically come with less risk than sending a worker up in a lift truck or onto a cell tower. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration publishes guidelines for the safe use of drones to inspect US workplaces.
Read full story at Esri…
Google will rename the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska's Denali mountain in Google Maps once a federal mapping database reflects changes ordered by the Trump administration
Google is complying with an executive order issued last week by President Donald Trump that changed the names of several American landmarks. The executive order was followed by a statement from the U.S. Department of the Interior, which said the name changes were now official and America's geographic naming bodies were working “expeditiously” to fulfill Trump's order.
“We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources,” Google wrote in a post on X.
Read full story at TechCrunch…
Doha, Qatar: The Communications Regulatory Authority (CRA) has announced its collaboration with Google to bring Qatar's landmarks and cultural heritage to the world through Street View in Google Maps.
… Google Street View” offers an invaluable resource for people of Qatar, visitors, and businesses. While people in Qatar can benefit from improved navigation, visitors can virtually explore Qatar's landmarks, such as Qatar's museums, Souq Waqif, The Corniche, Al Zubarah Fort, and even experience the thrill of cruising the sand dunes in the Inland Sea, before planning their trips. For businesses, particularly in tourism and retail, the platform provides global exposure and engagement opportunities. These efforts reinforce Qatar's position as a leading destination for culture, tourism, and business.
As part of this initiative, CRA worked with relevant entities in Qatar, including the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Department at the Ministry of Municipality, Qatar Tourism, and national security agencies.
Read full story at Peninsula…
Maharashtra-based agritech startup MapMyCrop uses AI and satellite imagery to help farmers and wholesalers track crops, predict yields, and optimise supply chains…without the need for expensive hardware.
Imagine you are a vegetable wholesaler, and a retail seller suddenly quadruples their order of tomatoes. Your current supply chain is already stretched, and fulfilling the order means sourcing from additional farms. A sudden spike in demand—often triggered by falling prices or seasonal trends—can force companies that procure and supply vegetables to retailers and restaurants to search for new vendors quickly.
One way to find new farms growing the vegetables you need is to look within your network or contact middlemen who know farmers, resulting in a long and tedious process. What if there was a simpler way?
What if companies could locate farms growing specific crops just by looking at them from the sky and directly connecting with the farmers? It may sound complex, but Maharashtra-based startup MapMyCrop is doing just that. Founded by Swapnil Jadhav, Rajesh Shirole, and Sachin Sonigara in 2021, the agritech startup leverages the power of five satellites and advanced machine learning (ML) to provide crop monitoring services to farmers and wholesalers.
Read full story at Yourstory…
A look at key changes, their implications and emergent best practices as the start of President Donald Trump's second term brings shifts likely to have influence across state and local organizations
2025 marks the start of a new federal administration, introducing shifts that influence operations across federal, state and local governments. As priorities evolve — whether through funding adjustments or regulatory changes — these developments will certainly impact state and local programs and services. This piece highlights key changes, examines their implications and shares emerging best practices to help you stay ahead.
Early indicators from the new administration reveal a dual focus: shifting key responsibilities to states while simultaneously driving innovation at the federal level. These changes bring implications for funding, reporting and policy priorities as well as opportunities for state and local governments to adapt and innovate. Here are a few items that became evident to us:
Read full story at GovTech…
Snowplow signal prioritization technology promises to modernize how cities manage their winter maintenance operations. This advanced system allows snowplows to navigate through intersections more efficiently, ensuring rapid snow clearance and safer travel for community members.
As winter' icy grip tightens on cities across North America, urban planners and transportation officials are turning to innovative solutions to combat the age-old challenge of snow removal.
Among these cutting-edge approaches, snowplow signal prioritization technology promises to modernize how cities manage their winter maintenance operations. This advanced system allows snowplows to navigate through intersections more efficiently, ensuring rapid snow clearance and safer travel for community members.
Cities leveraging AI for snow removal
The implementation of snowplow signal prioritization technology demonstrates a significant leap forward in urban winter management strategies. By leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in a cloud-based environment, cities are now able to optimize traffic flow during inclement weather conditions, prioritizing the movement of essential vehicles such as snowplows, emergency responders and public transportation.
Read full story at America City & County…
Some employees who were in the U.S. Digital Service already when it became part of the DOGE fear the interviews are an assessment of their loyalty.
President Trump's Department of Government Efficiency has been re-interviewing existing employees in a White House tech team since Trump changed its name from the U.S. Digital Service to the United States DOGE Service after taking office, according to people familiar with the internal happenings.
The organization was originally set up in 2014 in the wake of the Healthcare.gov crash as a technology SWAT team that could deploy out to struggling government agencies.
Now, Trump is using the USDS for the DOGE, a project being led by billionaire Elon Musk to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies,” as Trump wrote when he announced the effort last fall.
Read full story at FCW…
J-Magic backdoor infected organizations in a wide array of industries.
When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can't be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what's known in the business as a “magic packet.” On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise VPNs running Juniper Network's Junos OS has been doing just that.
J-Magic, the tracking name for the backdoor, goes one step further to prevent unauthorized access. After receiving a magic packet hidden in the normal flow of TCP traffic, it relays a challenge to the device that sent it. The challenge comes in the form of a string of text that's encrypted using the public portion of an RSA key. The initiating party must then respond with the corresponding plaintext, proving it has access to the secret key.
Read full story at arsTechnica…
DeepSeek has completely upended people’s expectations for AI and competition with China. What is it, and why does it matter?
… The DeepSeek-V2 model introduced two important breakthroughs: DeepSeekMoE and DeepSeekMLA. The “MoE” in DeepSeekMoE refers to “mixture of experts”. Some models, like GPT-3.5, activate the entire model during both training and inference; it turns out, however, that not every part of the model is necessary for the topic at hand. MoE splits the model into multiple “experts” and only activates the ones that are necessary; GPT-4 was a MoE model that was believed to have 16 experts with approximately 110 billion parameters each.
DeepSeekMoE, as implemented in V2, introduced important innovations on this concept, including differentiating between more finely-grained specialized experts, and shared experts with more generalized capabilities. Critically, DeepSeekMoE also introduced new approaches to load-balancing and routing during training; traditionally MoE increased communications overhead in training in exchange for efficient inference, but DeepSeek's approach made training more efficient as well.
Read full story at Stratechery…
In a move to push users toward Copilot AI, Microsoft has deprecated this popular feature
Since 2016, Microsoft Word users have had access to Smart Lookup, a nifty feature that lets you right-click on a word or phrase and bring up definitions, synonyms, and relevant links to sites like Wikipedia.
Now, however, Windows Latest reports that Microsoft has decided to retire the Smart Lookup feature. If you check out the Smart Lookup support page, Microsoft has added a notice at the top:
As of this writing, if you right-click on a word or phrase and select Search “[word/phrase]” vin the context menu, it'll open up the Search pane like usual, but you won' get any search results. It'll get stuck loading before eventually saying: “Someme thing went wrong. Please try again.”
Read full story at PCWorld…
A broad coalition of electric utilities, EPCs, technology providers and other companies have applied for federal funding that, if awarded, would accelerate the deployment of multiple small modular reactors (SMRs).
Last week we reported that the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is applying for $800 million in funding that would help the federal utility speed up deployment of a BWRX-300 SMR at TVA's Clinch River Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
The funding is through the U.S. Department of Energy's Generation III+ Small Modular Reactor (SMR) Program, launched in 2024. The award would move up the SMR's commercial operation date by two years, from 2035 to 2033, TVA said.
The broad coalition of partners includes Bechtel, BWX Technologies (BWXT), Duke Energy, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), GE Hitachi (GEH), Indiana Michigan Power, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, Sargent & Lundy, Scot Forge and North American Forgemasters, the State of Tennessee and other utilities and advanced nuclear project developers.
At this time, TVA's board of directors has not voted to approve an SMR at the Clinch River site. Should the board approve an SMR, the availability of DOE funding would help accelerate the early activities of the project.
Read full story at PowerEngineering…
Discover how utilities can leverage software to keep customers informed during outages and build trust.
Electricity consumption is on the rise, potentially leaving the grid more vulnerable to outages. Combined with extreme weather events that damage physical infrastructure such as poles and wires, necessitating rolling blackouts or public safety power shutoffs (PSPS), customers rely on their utilities to communicate when the lights will be turned back on. However, the communications surrounding these events often aren't timely, and haven't reflected real-time outages or power restorations. Through the modernization of a utility's underlying software, utilities can manage customer communications by being able to have visibility of the outages and customers impacted.
What traditionally happens during an outage?
Utilities rely heavily on their customers to report outages as they occur. As customers call to report outages, utilities face higher call volumes, which can strain their ability to determine when and where an outage has occurred and the customers impacted by the outage. If they cannot manage the inbound call volume effectively, this can negatively impact a utility's JD Power scores.
Read full story at UtilityDive…
Electric utilities, project developers, and policymakers are tasked with supporting energy-intensive data center and artificial intelligence operations while learning to harness the revolutionary tools enabled by new technology.
Electricity demand is growing exponentially in the United States, driven by the proliferation of data centers and artificial intelligence (AI). Grid constraints have made securing access to power no simple task, leading utilities, developers, and policymakers to devise creative mechanisms to support energy-intensive operations. A new DISTRIBUTECH event, DTECH Data Centers & AI, will help stakeholders in this burgeoning industry navigate power constraints and project delays while balancing the demand for sustainable, flexible solutions. Influential executives and thought leaders will assemble in San José, California from May 27-29, 2025 to discuss how AI is transforming the utility landscape and explore ways power providers can manage increasing demand while utilizing the revolutionary tools promised by new technologies.
Read full story at PowerGrid International…
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