 |
|
|
|||||
Earlier this month, the House Oversight Committee made public more than 20,000 pages of documents from the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epsteins estate. The documents were released as thousands of individual text files, images, and scanned PDFs, a monumental trove most wouldnt have the time or patience to sift through. But what if you could navigate the source documents as easily as you do your inbox? That was the thinking behind Jmail, a Gmail-style interface for accessible browsing of Epstein’s released emails launched Friday by Kino CEO Luke Igel and software engineer Riley Walz. Walz, a serial website builder previously dubbed San Franciscos Tech Jester, is also one of the masterminds behind the Panama Playlists, which earlier this year exposed the Spotify listening habits of some famous people, as well as a tool to track San Francisco’s parking cops (the project lasted just four hours). In an X post announcing the Epstein project, Walz confirmed the pair used Googles Gemini AI to do optical character recognition on the individual emails, making them more readable and searchable than the source documents. The site also includes verification links to government originals. “You are logged in as Jeffrey Epstein, jeevacation@gmail.com,” the Jmail website reads. These are real emails released by Congress. Just like a real inbox, the messages are sorted from most recent, dating up to the eve before Epstein’s arrest in 2019. Theres also a working search feature (search Trump, and youll get 1,000 results). In the sidebar, you can sort by Inbox, Starred, and Sent. Copying Gmails ability to star important messagesexcept this time crowdsourced by the internetthe most-starred email, with 228 stars, is correspondence with Epsteins brother, Mark L. Epstein. It contains the now infamous line: Ask him if Putin has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba? The lower sidebar section is sorted into Labels, which, in Gmail, separates emails by category. In Jmail, it is a list of people who regularly corresponded with Epstein, including journalist Michael Wolff, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, to name a few. The House Oversight Committee released the original emails on November 12. Since that release, the president has signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which requires the attorney general to make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice within 30 days.
Category:
E-Commerce
Africas official maps are stuck in the past, often either outdated, incompleteor both. But governments dont have the budgets to fix them, making it difficult to complete projects as complex as deciding where to put new solar plants to as simple as delivering a package. Now a new plan is underway to map the entire continent using satellite data and AI. Maybe 90% of African countries dont have access to an accurate current base map for their country, says Sohail Elabd, global director of emerging markets at Esri, the mapping company behind the Map Africa Initiative. At a United Nations event last year, Elabd met the heads of national mapping departments from around 30 African countries. Nearly all said they didnt have accurate base mapsthe foundational maps that are critical for everything from urban planning to disaster response. Everyone was complaining that theyre struggling, he says. They had no funding. On the plane ride home, he started thinking about what satellite data could make possible. Traditionally, mapping a country required flying specialized planes with sensors and cameras over the land for a month or more, along with extensive data collection on the ground. “Usually it’s a very costly process and time consuming,” says Elabd. Now AI can analyze satellite data and create detailed maps at a fraction of the cost. The new project will train AI to recognize features across different terrains, from roads in the desert to homes in the rainforest. Then it will produce base maps that include physical features of the landscape, buildings and roads, and geographic boundaries. The project will also map additional layers, from agricultural fields to urban infrastructure and vegetation. It’s possible to map not only where farms or trees are located but also to analyze the type of crop and the species of each individual tree. While satellite data and AI are already used in mapping, the continent-wide scale of the project is unprecedented. The maps can help governments update land registries and plan everything from where to best deploy wind and solar farms to port infrastructure improvements. They can help make navigation systems more accurate. And in parts of Africa where standard addresses don’t existmaking it hard to make deliveries or deploy emergency servicesthe new maps can give governments the details they need to create address systems. The project will launch early next year, with Space42, a UAE-based space tech company, providing satellite data, and Microsoft supplying cloud infrastructure and the AI framework. Each African country must submit an official request to participate. After the AI is trained, updating the maps will become significantly cheaper, and each country will receive a data management system for annual or biannual updates. The same approach can help other areas that have gaps in map data, including South America and parts of Asia. Elabd notes, The platform we are building for Africa is designed to be reusable and cost-effective for other regions, and it can produce base maps anywhere in the world.
Category:
E-Commerce
When its parked in your garage, the Polestar 3 can now help you save on your electric bill. The automaker is the latest to roll out bidirectional charging for its electric vehicles, making it possible to charge the SUVs battery when power is cheap and then use the vehicle to power your house when prices go up. The company partnered with Dcbel, a startup that makes technology that manages the flow of energy between the car and home. “Most of our cars sit in driveways more than 80% of the time,” says Dcbel CEO Marc-André Forget. “Now, for the first time, if we think about it, cars start to be useful even when parked. This is transformational. It’s the second-largest investment for most family after the market of the home, and those assets are underused.” The 2026 Polestar 3 [Photo: Polestar] When you plug the car into Dcbel’s home energy station, called the Ara, artificial intelligence kicks in and analyzes energy prices, forecasts how much energy you’ll need over the next few days and how much you need for driving, and, if you have solar panels, it also predicts how much solar power you’ll be generating. The device uses that data to decide, “Should I charge the car right now?” Forget says. “Should I supercharge the car? Should I wait and charge later? Should I use the energy from the car to power the house, to basically avoid buying energy from the grid at a very high price?” When your house needs power, the equipment converts DC power from your car into AC for the wiring in your home. (The tech can also double as an inverter for solar panels, though if you already have a solar inverter, it likely doesn’t have the right software to work with an EV.) [Photo: Dcbel] Any EV could become bidirectional, but automakers need to develop software to make it work. Polestar spent 18 months working with Dcbel to design a seamless user experience. Users can track the system through an app, though it handles everything automatically. If the power goes out in the middle of the night, the car will wake up and start charging your house. If the grid is down over a long period, the car’s battery can charge an average house for 2.5 days, or as long as 10 days if you start rationing power. The home energy system is pricey, starting at $5,000 for a base model. But in California, Dcbel won a grant that will provide customers with generous rebates: up to $8,100 for a full-featured version of the tech, up to $2,000 for installation, up to $200 for interconnecting to the grid, $1,000 to enroll in a dynamic rate utility program, and up to $2,500 toward a bidirectional EV like the Polestar 3. The rebates are first-come, first-serve, and decline over time. But for the first customers, the charging equipment could be nearly free. “We chose to focus on California primarily because of the state incentives that are available,” says Peter Wexler, head of product for Polestar in North America. “They made a natural introductory plan for us.” Customers in other states can buy Dcbel’s charging system, but would have to front the full cost. For utilities, this type of system can help stabilize the grid. Power demand surges at certain timeswhen everyone gets home from work in the evening, or when everyone turns on their AC during a heat wave. If enough EV owners use their batteries to power their house when demand is highest, it can make it possible for utilities to avoid turning to more polluting sources like gas power plants. California also has some vehicle-to-grid (V2G) pilots that allow EV owners to sell power back to the grid at peak hours and make money, but that isnt yet widely available since the public utility commission still needs to finalize interconnection and compensation rules. Dcbels equipment will enable V2G charging as soon as utilities permit it. Dcbel has developed and shared a new software standard for bidirectional charging that it hopes automakers will universally adopt; it’s currently working with eight automakers to add other cars to its system. Forget contends that more cars with this capability will likely roll out soon, noting, “I think we’re going to see lots of news about current cars becoming bidirectional over the next couple of months.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||