Singapore Trials Patrol Robots To Aid Authorities In Enhancing Public Health And Safety

It looks like Boston Dynamics’ Spot won’t be the only robot patrolling around in Singapore. The country’s Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) announced on Sunday that it has begun a three-week trial of two robots, known as Xavier, to patrol the city state’s Toa Payoh Central district. During its trial phase, the duo will autonomously navigate through the high foot traffic location to aid public officers deter “undesirable social behaviours.”

Rather than an intimidating chrome cladded bipedal law enforcer, the Xavier robots are quad-wheeled autonomous drones with cameras (including one with 360-degree capability) and a display, which are more R2-D2-like rather than Robocop. According to HTX, should its cameras detect individuals exhibiting the aforementioned misbehaviours, the robots will trigger real-time alerts to the command and control centre.

For clarity, the agency specified that offenses categorised as such include smoking in prohibited areas, illegal hawking, improper parking of bicycles within Toa Payoh Central’s HDB Hub, congregation of more than five individuals, and motorised active mobility devices and motorcycles on footpaths. If detected, the Xavier robots will display the appropriate message on its built-in screen to educate the public and deter such behaviours. A mere slap on the wrist, but embarrassing nonetheless for offenders, especially after getting nagged by a robot in public.

HTX iterated that the Xavier patrol robots would not be used for Singapore law enforcement during the three-week trial, which starts from 5 September 2021. “The deployment of Xavier will support the work of public officers as it will reduce the manpower required for foot patrols and improve operation efficiency,” the agency said.

ProtonMail Caught Handing Over IP Address Of French Activist To Swiss Authorities

ProtonMail, an email provider that champions privacy through it’s end-to-end encrypted service, is under heavy criticism after a police report was uncovered showing that they had provided French authorities with the IP address of a French climate activist, leading to their arrest. While ProtonMail does not need to comply with French or EU laws, the Switzerland-based company must comply with the Swiss courts; and so, French authorities went through the Swiss police to get a court order.

Andy Yen, Proton Technologies CEO, came out with a statement that the company had no choice but to comply with the legally binding order as they are obligated to follow local laws. Under its own transparency report, they state that they are legally bound to log IP addresses “in extreme criminal cases,” such as when an account is suspected to be involved in criminal activity. “There was no possibility to appeal this particular request,” he said.

Andy added that their encryption be bypassed, meaning they, and therefore the authorities, have no access to the contents of users’ emails. “We do not know the identity of our users, and at no point were we aware that the targeted users were climate activists,” said the CEO. While Swiss law requires users to be notified of any requests for their data, ProtonMail notes that “in certain circumstances,” a notification “can be delayed.”

The data request was part of an investigation into a group of climate activists that protested against gentrification by occupying commercial locations and apartments near Paris’ Place Sainte Marthe. While it started as a local effort, it quickly grew into a national movement. On 1 September, the group published an article on an anti-capitalist news site that French police had contacted the Swiss authorities through Europol to uncover the owner of their ProtonMail account.

Proton reports that in 2020, it received 3572 orders for user information, contested 750 orders, and complied with 3017 requests. That number is more than double the number of requests from the Swiss authorities on behalf of foreign governments from the previous year, meaning that Swiss courts are issuing orders that violate privacy at an alarming rate. Amidst this worrying case, Andy Yen encourages its users to use Tor or ProtonVPN, as Swiss law does not touch on IP logging for VPNs.

Google Denies Service Downtime Caused By Data Centre Fire In France; Russian Authorities Disagree

Google and Russia have provided conflicting reasons to why Google and YouTube services were briefly disrupted in the country, the BBC reported. The Russian government blamed a fire at cloud provider OVH data centres in Strasbourg, France. But Google disputes this.

Instead, the tech giant attributed the downtime to a router misconfiguration at a local third-party internet service provider.

“Following extensive investigation we have no evidence to indicate that the fire in OVHCloud’s data centre, or Google’s own infrastructure, was the root cause of this incident,” Google said, according to the BBC.

In contrast, Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media regulating authority, pointed fingers at the fire and said the service disruptions were “not connected to the agency’s actions on restriction of speed of access to the Twitter social platform”.

Roskomnadzor had recently slowed down the speed of Twitter in the country, claiming the platform failed to remove 3,000 posts related to suicide, drugs, and pornography. The authority said the move was aimed at protecting Russian citizens.

Incredibly popular in Russia, Twitter is frequently used by government opponents like Alexei Navalny, a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

OVH, which operates the affected data centre, boasts 1.6 million customers across 140 countries. But Google services in Russia are not believed to be routed through OVH, the BBC said.

The fire does have one confirmed victim – the multiplayer video game Rust. The game’s developers tweeted that some player progression data was gone for good.