The Week USA - August 24, 2019

Billionaire investor Peter Thiel seems to have

opened up “a new front in the war between

Trump’s Washington and Silicon Valley,” said

Scott Rosenberg in Axios.com. Thiel suggested

on Fox News last month that Chinese intel-

ligence agents had “infiltrated” Google, calling

on the FBI and CIA to investigate. He followed

that up with an op-ed piece in The New York

Times last week questioning why Google has

expanded its artificial intelligence research in

China while it eschews working with the Pen-

tagon. A libertarian who supports President

Trump, Thiel is the chairman of Palantir, a data-

mining company that works extensively with the Pentagon and

U.S. intelligence agencies. But “neither Thiel nor anyone else has

backed up these charges with evidence,” and Google—unlike

Microsoft—actually pulled its search engine from China in 2010

over censorship concerns. “By raising the issues as questions, the

accusers get to spread suspicions without being accountable.”

Google’s activities in China might not be unlawful, said Gordon

Chang in The Washington Times, but that does not mean they

aren’t “highly injurious to American national security.” The

company first established the Google AI China Center in 2017

and participates in AI research at Tsinghua University and Peking

University. On the surface, these ventures seem innocuous. But

Chinese President Xi Jinping has “vigorously promoted a trend”

of civil-military fusion, whereby “technology that is developed

in the civil world transfers to the military

world.” Google’s plans in China are for the

long term: It wants to use its AI research lab

and the university collaborations to bolster

its cloud computing and quantum comput-

ing capabilities. But it should know that,

“with each investment Western firms make

into China, the People’s Liberation Army

benefits.”

Come on, is this really “the level of intellec-

tual rigor Thiel brings to his investments?”

asked Owen Thomas in the San Francisco

Chronicle. “The claim Thiel advances about Google doing busi-

ness with the Chinese military, which Google specifically denies,

is outright false.” It’s based on a thin speculation that some of the

Google AI work done in China could leak to the Chinese military.

Bashing Google is a long-standing hobby for Thiel. “And given

his obvious conflicts, should we believe anything he says about his

business rivals?” Thiel’s outlandish accusations are really intended

for an audience of one, said Lizette Chapman in Bloomberg.com.

His investments in Chinese companies have all failed. But three of

his most promising investments rely heavily on federal spending,

including Palantir, which competes with Google for government

cloud software contracts. Of course, “federal contract approvals

are supposed to be an objective process.” But his suddenly protec-

tionist rhetoric and patriotic messaging “won plaudits from Presi-

dent Trump and could return benefits to his companies.”

Research: Foes bash Google with Chinese spying claim

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‘Farming’ fraudulent ad clicks

“Ordinary Americans are using armies of

phones to generate cash to buy food, diapers,

and beer through ad fraud,” said Joseph Cox

in Vice.com. The practice, called “phone

farming,” was borne out of the ecosystem

of websites that have begun compensating

consumers to watch or interact with digital

advertisements, either in the form of cash or

points that can be exchanged for other goods.

Some “farmers” have industrialized the pro-

cess, using hundreds of phones to run the

cash-paying apps. To test the scam for our-

selves, we bought four Android phones over

the internet to run an app that paid me to

watch Netflix trailers over and over again. But

we found “some of these money-making apps

are buggy,” and keeping the apps going was

labor-intensive and not exactly fruitful.

An e-reader cure for phone addiction

The best way to treat your smartphone ad-

diction might be with an e-reader, said Brian

Chen in The New York Times. I tested Ama-

zon’s new Kindle Oasis. It’s a bit bulkier than

other Kindles and not as pleasant to hold for

long periods as the cheaper Kindle Paperwhite.

But its “signature feature, the adjustable light,

is a delight.” The device lets “you tweak the

color tone from cool to warm”—at night, a

feature I appreciated. The e-reader also pro-

vided “a respite from the hateful comments

on social media and the stress-inducing news

articles we consume on the web.” Last week,

while trying to sleep, I found myself “stuck in

a feverish loop of incessantly checking Twitter

and email.” I downloaded a book about dogs

on the Kindle, and “I was out like a light.”

New tariffs could hit the iPhone

President Trump’s new tariffs on products

made in China could add $100 to the price of

your next iPhone, said Jefferson Graham in

USA Today. The threat of a 10 percent tariff

on another $300 million of goods imported

from China—this time including consumer

electronics—sent Apple’s stock tumbling last

week. The company has been weighing mov-

ing some of its production from Chinese soil,

but that would take years. In the meantime,

Apple is expected to release three new models

of the iPhone in September and has already

been struggling with sagging sales of its signa-

ture product. An analyst said, “Apple could

lose sales of between 6 million and 8 million

iPhones because of the tariffs.” Apple shares

dropped precipitously early this week as the

trade war accelerated.

Bytes: What’s new in tech

Scientists

have

created

a robotic

eye lens

that would

allow you

to zoom

in and out by blinking, said Daisy

Hernandez in Popular Mechanics.

Researchers at the University of

California, San Diego designed a

“soft robot” that acts as a contact

lens, using “the electrooculographic

signal naturally produced by our

eyes to perform vision-enhancing

tasks.” Five electrodes across the

lens—essentially the muscles that

power the device—are programmed

to respond when they receive

an electrical signal from the eye,

expanding when the eye blinks

twice to produce zoomed vision.

“Another double blink de-activates

the zoom and sets vision back to

normal.” The contact can magnify

the image by as much as 32 per-

cent. “Researchers are hopeful that

they can use this tech in the future

to create a fully functioning pros-

thetic eye.”

Innovation of the week

20 NEWS Technology

Thiel: China has ‘infiltrated’ Google.