GM announced Friday it will invest $300 million into a Michigan factory to produce a new Chevrolet electric vehicle, reversing a decision to build the EV outside of the United States. The announcement comes on the heels of recent job cuts and plant closures by GM, moves that have complicated bargaining with union workers over a new four-year contract and has sparked intense criticism from President Donald Trump over a decision to end production at a factory in Lordstown, Ohio.
The automaker’s investment into its Orion Township, Michigan assembly plant — the same facility that already produces the all-electric Chevy Bolt — will add 400 new jobs. Orion Assembly, which employs about 880 hourly and 130 salaried employees, also produces the Chevrolet Sonic and the Cruise AV test vehicles.
GM isn’t revealing details about what the new electric vehicle will look like, cost, or any of its performance metrics. It will be designed and engineered off an advanced version of the Bolt EV architecture, the company said. Additional product information and timing for the new Chevrolet EV will be released closer to production.
This new Chevy EV is a separate effort within the company’s newly announced plans to turn Cadillac into an electric brand. Cadillac will be the first brand to get vehicles off a future EV platform, GM said.
GM says its decision to produce the EV in the U.S. was driven by rules of origin provisions in the proposed United States, Mexico and Canada Agreement and because the new EV will be based of an advanced version of the Bolt’s architecture, which is made at Orion.
The announcement comes as GM makes adjustments to where it allocates resources in an effort to cut costs in certain areas and shifts funds towards other programs.
GM has been undergoing a transformation over the past four to five years, getting rid of expensive, money-losing programs like the Opel brand in Europe, and investing more into electrification and autonomous vehicle technology. It has also warned repeatedly of a coming downturn in the traditional automotive business.
In November, GM ramped up its belt-tightening measures with cuts to thousands of factory and white-collar workers, plant closures in North America and the elimination of several car models as it tries to transform into a nimble company focused on high-margin SUVs, crossovers and trucks, and investments in future products like electric and autonomous vehicles.
In addition to layoffs, GM’s unallocated plants have impacted some 2,800 U.S. hourly employees. GM emphasized Friday that the company has job openings at several other U.S. manufacturing plants for U.S. hourly employees impacted by the recent announcement of unallocated plants. Other GM manufacturing plants adding jobs include Flint, Michigan; Spring Hill, Tennessee; Bowling Green, Kentucky; Arlington, Texas; and Toledo, Ohio.
GM confirmed it has 2,700 openings across its U.S. manufacturing plants. To date, 1,100 employees have been placed at other GM plants, with several hundred more in the process of being placed in new jobs. In addition, 1,200 of these employees are retirement eligible.
The automaker also plans to add 1,000 jobs at the Flint Truck Assembly Plant.
Source: TechCrunch
“Don’t read the comments” is one of those cliches that sticks around because it’s still good advice — maybe the best advice. But the team at Respondology is trying to change that.
The company started out by helping brands find and respond to messages on social media. Senior Vice President of Sales Aaron Benor explained that in the course of that work, it also built a tool to mitigate “the vitriol, the awful toxicity of online social media.”
“We realized that the tool had a lot more legs than we thought, and we decided to pursue it full force and sunset the advertising business,” Benor said. “What really I love about this new product is that the big picture, long-term, is: We can put an end to cyberbullying.”
That’s a big goal, and to be clear, Respondology isn’t trying to reach it immediately. Instead, it’s launching a product called The Mod that allows individual brands and influencers to weed out toxic, trollish or spammy comments on Instagram and YouTube, rendering them invisible to most followers.
Benor explained that the product has two lines of defense. First, there’s automated keyword detection, where certain words will cause a comment to be flagged. The customer can decide which categories they want to filter out (“mild” or “severe” swearing, sexual references, racist remarks and so on), and they can also view and reinstate flagged comments from their Respondology dashboard.
Respondology settings
Second, the company has built up a network of around 1,500 moderators who look at all the comments that aren’t flagged, and they can decide whether they’re appropriate to post. So even if a comment doesn’t use one of the red-flag keywords, a human can still catch it. (Customers that want to be extra careful can also turn on an option where multiple moderators vote on whether a comment should be hidden or posted.)
Benor demonstrated the system for me using a test Instagram account. I got to play the troll, posting several comments at his prompting. Each time, the comment was visible for just a few seconds before the Respondology system sprang into action and the comment disappeared.
When I posted profanity, it was automatically flagged and stayed hidden, while my other comments popped up in the moderation app — and if they were approved, they’d reappear on Instagram. All of this activity remained hidden from my account, where it just looked like my comments had been published normally.
Of course, the big social platforms have built their own moderation tools, but it seems clear that the problem remains unsolved. And even if platform moderation improves, Benor said, “This is an agnostic tool. [Our customers] have complete choice and control. This is not the platform saying, ‘This is what we’re going to offer you’; this is what’s going to work for you as a creator.”
We also discussed a recent story in The Verge highlighting the impact that moderating toxic content can have on people’s mental and emotional health. But Benor argued that while Facebook moderators have to spend most of their time dealing with “the worst of the worst,” Respondology’s team is mostly just approving innocuous commentary. Plus, they’re freelancers who only work when they want, and can stop at any time.
“We haven’t heard any negative feedback,” Benor added. “We all act as moderators ourselves — because what better way is there to know the product and understand it — and I’ve never been shocked by what I’ve seen.”
Respondology charges customers of The Mod based on the volume of comments. Benor said the pricing can range from “a few dollars a month to a few thousand dollars a month.”
Ultimately, he’s hoping to release a version for non-professional users too — so parents, for example, can automatically hide the worst comments from their kids’ online accounts.
Source: TechCrunch
Rumors suggest Nvidia might soon launch the GTX 1650, and a leaked benchmark listing from Final Fantasy XV suggests that the new graphics card could be just a slight upgrade over last generation’s GTX 1050 Ti.
The post Nvidia’s GTX 1650 graphics card could be just a slight upgrade over the 1050 Ti appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Google stole the spotlight at this year’s GDC with the launch of Stadia. What the game streaming service lacked in specifics, it more than made up for in buzz. The software giant certainly isn’t the only one eyeing the space, however. A new report from US Gamer puts Walmart in the running, as well.
The retailer has spent the last several years making a push into the high-tech sphere. It has made some high-profile acquisitions, including Jet.com, in a bid to compete with the likes of Amazon. The company has even been testing out inventory-checking robots in around 50 or so of its stores. And with the recent exit of CTO Jeremy King, it could well be looking for the next big thing.
According to the reports, Walmart has been meeting with developers and publishers at GDC. It’s tough to say how advanced these talks are, and those involved with the leaks have understandably wished to remain anonymous. The company certainly has the back-end infrastructure to attempt a service. It also has a loyal base of customers in the U.S. to whom it sells a lot of video games.
But given how it abandoned plans for a video streaming service as of January, the talks could be little more than just talk.
Source: TechCrunch
Homeland Security has issued a warning for a set of critical-rated vulnerabilities in Medtronic defibrillators that put the devices at risk of manipulation.
These small cardio-defibrillators are implanted in a patient’s chest to deliver small electrical shocks to prevent irregular or dangerously fast heartbeats, which can prove fatal. Most modern devices come with wireless or radio-based technology to allow patients to monitor their conditions and their doctors to adjust settings without having to carry out an invasive surgery.
But the government-issued alert warned that Medtronic’s proprietary radio communications protocol, known as Conexus, wasn’t encrypted and did not require authentication, allowing a nearby attacker with radio-intercepting hardware to modify data on an affected defibrillator.
Homeland Security gave the alert a 9.3 out of 10 rating, describing it as requiring “low skill level” to exploit.
It doesn’t mean that anyone with an affected defibrillator is suddenly a walking target for hackers. These devices aren’t always broadcasting a radio frequency as it would be too battery intensive. Medtronic said patients would be most at risk when patients are getting their implant checked while they’re at their doctor’s office. At all other times, the defibrillator will occasionally wake up and listen for a nearby monitoring device if it’s in range, narrowing the scope of an attack.
More than 20 different Medtronic defibrillators and models are affected, the alert said, including the CareLink programmer used in doctor’s offices and the MyCareLink monitor used in patient homes.
Peter Morgan, founder and principal at Clever Security, found and privately reported the bug to Medtronic in January. In an email, Morgan told TechCrunch that the bugs weren’t easy to discover, but warned of a potential risk to patients.
“It is possible with this attack to cause harm to a patient, either by erasing the firmware that is giving necessary therapy to the patient’s heart, or by directly invoking shock related commands on the defibrillator,” he said. “Since this protocol is unauthenticated, the ICD cannot discern if communications its receiving are coming from a trusted Medtronic device, or an attacker.”
A successful attacker could erase or reprogram the defibrillator’s firmware, and run any command on the device.
Medtronic said in its own advisory that it’s not aware of any patient whose devices have been attacked, but that the company was “developing updates” to fix the vulnerabilities, but did not say when fixes would be rolled out.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates medical devices, provided a list of the affected devices.
It’s the latest example of smart medical devices taking a turn for the worst, even as spending in healthcare cybersecurity is set to become a $65 billion industry by 2021.
The FDA rolled out non-binding recommendations in 2016 to advise medical device makers into practicing better cybersecurity to prevent these kinds of flaws from occurring in the first place, advising companies to “build in cybersecurity controls when they design and develop the device to assure proper device performance in the face of cyber threats.”
Yet, this latest government alert marks the second time in two years Medtronic was forced to respond to security flaws in its medical devices. In October, the company finally shuttered an internet-based software update system that put its pacemaker-monitoring devices at risk.
Source: TechCrunch
Gravity is a real pain for aspiring space travelers. These equations explain how to defy it.
Source: Wired
The title won big at this week’s Independent Gaming Festival.
Source: Wired
Once relatively obscure, Chromebooks have come into their own in a big way in recent years. One of our favorites is the super-sleek Google Pixelbook, and it’s on sale right now from Amazon for $200 off, letting you score this premium laptop for $799.
The post Looking for a Chromebook? The Google PixelBook just got a $200 price cut appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Opinion: Utah legislators recently voted to pass landmark legislation in support of a new privacy law. Statehouses across the country should take notes.
Source: Wired
The intense snow and rainfall and of the last several weeks have saturated the ground and rivers, leaving little room for yet more upcoming rain.
Source: Wired