Harry says he warned Twitter boss ahead of Capitol riot

The Duke of Sussex has said he warned Twitter boss Jack Dorsey about political unrest in the US – just a day before the deadly 6 January riots.

“I warned him his platform was allowing a coup to be staged,” Prince Harry said at the RE:WIRED tech forum in the US.

“That email was sent the day before. And then it happened and I haven’t heard from him since,” the duke said.

He was speaking at a session discussing whether social media was contributing to misinformation and online hatred.

Mr Dorsey, who is Twitter’s chief executive officer, has so far made no public comments on the issue.

Internet ‘being defined by hate, division and lies’
Prince Harry, who now lives with his wife Duchess of Sussex in California, appeared at Tuesday’s session via video chat as a guest speaker. He was introduced as the co-founder of the Archewell organisation.

The duke used his personal experience with online hatred and the press to reflect that social media companies were not doing enough to stop the spread of misinformation.

He said the internet was “being defined by hate, division and lies”, adding: “That can’t be right.”

His appearance via video chat comes two weeks after a data analytics company alleged that 70% of the hate directed towards the Duke and Duchess of Sussex on Twitter was generated by just 55 accounts.

Meanwhile, investigations into what happened on 6 January, when a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC and disrupted the official certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the White House race, are continuing.

More than 670 people have been charged with taking part.

On Tuesday, a congressional committee investigating the riots summoned more of Mr Trump’s closest aides to give evidence.

Among the latest batch is a former White House press secretary, a senior policy adviser and personal assistants.

The inquiry is trying to find out if Mr Trump had foreknowledge of the attack.

TikTok: Missing girl found after using viral call for help sign

A teenager who went missing in the US has been found after she used hand signals that went viral on TikTok to show she was in danger.

The girl had been reported missing by her parents in North Carolina on Tuesday morning, and was spotted inside a car in Kentucky two days later.

The 16-year-old used the gesture designed to help domestic abuse victims ask for help to alert a passing driver.

Authorities say they arrested a 61-year-old man.

A driver called police after noticing “a female passenger in the vehicle making hand gestures that are known on the social media platform TikTok to represent violence at home – I need help – domestic violence,” the Laurel County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.

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The caller noted that the girl “appeared to be in distress” and was being driven by an older male.

The girl, who has not been named, told officers she had travelled through North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio.

Police later arrested James Herbert Brick, 61, of Cherokee, North Carolina, while he was driving near a Kentucky interstate on Thursday afternoon.

Signal for Help

The hand gesture is a one-handed sign someone can use when in distress, according to the Canadian Women’s Foundation.

The victim holds up their hand with their palm facing out, then tucks their thumb into their hand before closing their fingers on top of the thumb.

The campaign, called the “signal for help”, spread across social media in 2020 during the initial pandemic lockdowns, in an attempt to address a rise in domestic violence.

The idea was a way for domestic abuse victims to seek help using a non-verbal cue.

Videos demonstrating the signs also gained momentum in the UK in the aftermath of the murder of Sarah Everard, which sparked a debate over women’s safety.

Facebook’s metaverse plans labelled as ‘dystopian’ and ‘a bad idea’

One of Facebook’s earliest investors has labelled the social media giant’s plans for a metaverse as “dystopian”.

Meta, as Facebook is now known, is investing billions in the project.

But Roger McNamee told the BBC: “It’s a bad idea and the fact we are all sitting and looking at this like it’s normal should be alarming everyone.”

Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox told attendees at the Web Summit in Lisbon that the idea would make “the internet less flat”.

He said it would be considerably better than video conferencing as a space for meetings.

However, speaking at the same event, Mr McNamee was highly sceptical.

“Facebook should not be allowed to create a dystopian metaverse,” he said.

The term metaverse was coined in the 1990s in a science fiction novel Snow Crash, where it served as a virtual reality successor to the internet.

Apparently, it’s the next big thing. What is the metaverse?
Facebook changes its name to Meta in major rebrand
Mr McNamee became a critic of Facebook as he began to see more misinformation on the platform. He said he was not convinced the metaverse would be safe in chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s hands.

“There’s no way that a regulator or policymaker should be allowing Facebook to operate there [in the metaverse] or get into cryptocurrencies,” he said.

“Facebook should have lost the right to make its own choices. A regulator should be there giving pre-approval for everything they do. The amount of harm they’ve done is incalculable.”

Real life
Mr Cox, speaking for Meta, put forward a different view – that the metaverse idea is the next step for the internet as a whole, not just for his company.

“Technology often starts in lower resolutions versions of what it becomes,” he said.

Feedback from Meta’s Oculus virtual reality headset users was that the technology, which was improving all the time, could be “incredibly fun”.

Mr Cox told Nicholas Carlson, editor-in-chief of news publication Insider, that his own dabbling in the metaverse included hosting meetings and entertainment for staff.

He said he and his wife had watched a comedy show with Facebook employees in which everyone appeared as avatars: “Twenty of us in the room, co-workers, all laughing together.”

That same technology was a good alternative to video calls, he argued.

“Everyone is exhausted by video conferencing. You don’t know who is looking at who, everyone is constantly interrupting each other.”

Meetings in the metaverse would be far better, he said, with Meta working on how to improve “spatial audio and body language” in virtual reality.

When asked why anyone would want to meet in virtual reality, he said: “It will not replace real life – nothing should – and I don’t want to design something that does.”

Getting Meta
He acknowledged that no one company, such as Meta, would own the metaverse, pointing to Roblox as an example.

Roblox, a user-generated gaming platform valued at $30bn (£22bn) and with 37 million users around the globe, has its own plans for the metaverse.

Chief executive David Baszucki has for several years been outlining his vision of it as a digital place where people play, work or learn with millions of 3D experiences.

Why Roblox is a $30bn bet on the gaming Metaverse
Microsoft Teams gets 3D avatars in metaverse push
At Web Summit, Roblox’s head of music Jon Vlassopulos told the BBC: “I think our view of the metaverse is that we’ve been at it for about 15 years.

“So we’re ushering in the metaverse, and we feel it needs to be a place that everyone can access, a place where people can express themselves and connect together.

“We’ve been building around this vision for a long time. We’re excited that more people are coming it to validate that notion.”

Mr Cox was asked whether the metaverse – which Mr Carlson described as a “cartoon world” – was something that the tech giant should control.

He said that there would need to be “a set of standards and a set of protocols” along with “public discourse” about how to keep the space safe.

He added that Mr Zuckerberg was committed to safety, something he said the “company had been working on for over a decade”.

Instagram post previews to return on Twitter

Instagram has brought back support for Twitter card previews after removing the feature nine years ago.

Now, when users share an Instagram link on Twitter, a small preview of the post will be displayed.

Instagram controversially removed the feature shortly after being acquired by Facebook in 2012.

Twitter card previews started for some users on Wednesday and will eventually be available to everyone. Instagram and Twitter are both promoting the change.

“If you want to share your latest Instagram post on the Twitter timeline too, you’re in luck: now when you share a link to an IG post in a tweet, it’ll show up as a card with a preview of the photo,” read a tweet on Twitter’s official support account.

Instagram sparked controversy with users when it removed support for Twitter cards in 2012.

The platform said that it wanted to take back control of its content following its merger with Facebook.

Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom insisted at the time that the mandate came from himself, and not Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg.

He said Instagram was attempting to grow its web platform and shared hopes that the move would help increase traffic.

NSO Group: Israeli spyware company added to US trade blacklist

The Israeli company behind the controversial Pegasus spyware has been added to a US trade blacklist.

Pegasus has reportedly been used by nation states to target the phones of rights activists and journalists.

The US has now put its maker, NSO Group, on its “entity list”, banning business dealings with them.

NSO Group said it was “dismayed” by the decision, adding that its technology helped maintain US national security by “preventing terrorism and crime”.

It has long maintained that its software is sold only to military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies from countries with good human rights records.

But earlier this year, it was accused of having sold its technology to authoritarian governments, which then targeted innocent people.

“We look forward to presenting the full information regarding how we have the world’s most rigorous compliance and human rights programs that are based on the American values we deeply share, which already resulted in multiple terminations of contacts with government agencies that misused our products,” the company said in a statement.

However, US officials said that NSO Group and another Israeli firm, Candiru, had acted “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States”.

On the face of it this is a surprising move by the US government.

The US and Israel are close allies, with their respective cyber-experts having co-operated, for example, to restrain Iran’s nuclear programme.

But the Pegasus military-grade spyware developed and sold by Israel’s NSO Group has emerged as a formidable cyber-weapon, used by some of its more autocratic customers in the Middle East to target a wide range of people, not just criminals and terrorists.

Journalists, lawyers, peaceful activists and even a member of the UK’s House of Lords have all had their phones secretly infected with malware that allows the customer to read every message, access all their data and even remotely turn on the microphone without the owner’s knowledge.

2px presentational grey line
The US Commerce Department said the decision was “based on evidence that these entities developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, business people, activists, academics and embassy workers.

“These tools have also enabled foreign governments to conduct transnational repression, which is the practice of authoritarian governments targeting dissidents, journalists and activists outside of their sovereign borders to silence dissent. Such practices threaten the rules-based international order,” it said.

It also said the announcements were part of President Biden’s efforts to “stem the proliferation of digital tools used for repression”.

A Russian and a Singaporean company – which created hacking tools – were also added to the US trade blacklist.

Separately, the US State Department said it would not be taking action against Israel, Russia or Singapore, based on the actions of the individual companies.

Clegg: Facebook is mainly ‘barbecues and bar mitzvahs’

Sir Nick Clegg, Meta’s head of global affairs, has defended the firm formerly known as Facebook at the Web Summit.

Only the day before, whistleblower Frances Haugen had opened the conference in Lisbon by calling on boss Mark Zuckerberg to resign.

Sir Nick said she was entitled to her views but that there were “two sides to the story”.

And he claimed most of Facebook’s content was user-generated “barbecues and bar mitzvahs”.

“Whistleblowers are entitled to blow whistles and describe the world as they see it,” he told Matthew Garrahan, news editor of the Financial Times, in an interview on the Web Summit stage, which he joined via a live link-up to California.

But “the fundamental assertion that Meta algorithmically spoon-feeds hateful content because that increases our profits” was wrong, he said.

The former UK deputy prime minister reiterated the $14bn (£10.3bn) the company had put into keeping the community safe and the 40,000 moderators it employs.

And he said that at just 16 years old, the firm was “young” and still learning.

User-shaped
Sir Nick also tried to distance the company from the idea that Facebook’s recommendations formed the majority of content on the platform.

“The caricature in the media is the idea that people are helplessly receiving a content menu served up by the Facebook algorithm,” he said.

He said less than 10% was recommended. The other 90% of content was “shaped heavily” by user choices, based on friends, groups and pages they follow. And he said less than 4% of content was of a political nature.

But he acknowledged that the firm had been hit with “trenchant criticism” and needed to be more transparent.

Coming clean
Sir Nick said the firm had considered delaying the Meta rebrand and the new focus on the metaverse in the wake of Frances Haugen’s appearance before politicians in the US and the UK, and subsequent media coverage.

“We considered whether we move the announcement, as there was plenty of attention on us already and this would create more,” he said.

But he added: “We thought it was the right moment to come clean about the focus of the company, building towards the Metaverse.”

Asked if Meta would be acting on the criticism raised by Ms Haugen, he cited the example of how its use of a cross-check program – a system that looked at the content of high-profile accounts – had been referred to its oversight board.

Apple swipe
He denied a key early claim from the leaks that internal research suggested the firm knew that Instagram harmed teenagers, saying Meta’s attitude was “mischaracterised”.

But, he added, Meta had nevertheless decided to rethink its plans for a version of Instagram for children.

At the end of the interview he took a swipe at Apple, which earlier this year made updates to its operating system, allowing users to choose whether to share data with apps – in turn knocking billions off of Facebook’s ad revenue.

Given that Apple takes a cut of the revenue of apps on its store, he said the decision was “a flagrant example of double standards”.

“Apple merits a considerable amount of scrutiny, too,” he suggested.

This year’s Web Summit has strict Covid measures in place and a reduced audience of 40,000.

Organisers were unsure whether people would return to the event, which was forced to go virtual last year, due to the pandemic, but tickets have sold out.

Facebook’s metamorphosis – will it work?

The corporation formerly known as Facebook has a new name Meta.

There will still be a Facebook, and an Instagram and all the familiar platforms, as this is simply a renaming of the parent company alone.

The new name also invites people to participate on its “next chapter” – a 3D journey into the metaverse, which it sees as the future of the internet.

But some analysts wonder if the public will trust the firm enough to take part in Mark Zuckerberg’s new vision.

Does Meta matter?
The new name produced millions of online searches for the specific query Meta in the UK and US combined, analysts say.

Popular questions included:

What is Meta?
What does Meta mean?
What does Meta stand for?
Dive into the Oxford English Dictionary and various definitions of meta are available – as a prefix it “denotes change, transformation, permutation, or substitution”, or “beyond, above, at a higher level”.

The company says it favours “beyond”, but it is also seeking a metamorphosis of sorts.

A chance perhaps too to welcome a new brand untainted by leaks and negative press, though an analyst with Forrester noted “a name change doesn’t suddenly erase the systemic issues plaguing the company”.

Officially though it’s about the future.

“Our new company brand captures where our company is going and the future we want to help build,” Meta said.

That destination is the metaverse.

What on earth is the metaverse?
The company believes the metaverse will be the next evolution in the way we use the internet.

“In this future, you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up.” chief executive Mr Zuckerberg wrote.

Some of that may seem familiar to those who have spent the pandemic in video conference calls, but the vision for the metaverse will remind others of earlier virtual worlds, such as Second Life.

However, Meta stresses this is not a virtual world, but a new three-dimensional space to be used and accessed in various ways, saying: “Augmented reality glasses to stay present in the physical world, virtual reality to be fully immersed, and phones and computers to jump in from existing platforms.”

The company says it is: “A social, 3D virtual space where you can share immersive experiences with other people, even when you can’t be together in person – and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world.”

Azeem Azhar, author of Exponential, says: “It’s not going to be something that will be contained in a VR headset that sits in the corner of the living room. It will be a set of things that will show up across our different applications and across our devices, as those devices get better and better.”

Will it work?
Writing in The Times, technology analyst Benedict Evans characterised Facebook’s motivation this way: “If there is something after smartphones, Facebook wants to be landlord, not a tenant.”

But is the metaverse the right real estate?

Mr Azhar says the “crunch point” is answering the question for the general consumer: “What is the thing that we will actually need to do with this?”

He says at the moment: “We’re still looking for that absolute killer application of these virtual reality and augmented reality technologies.”

And if it does succeed, rather than replacing existing tech, the metaverse will sit alongside it. “It may be 20-odd years since text messaging became popular and people still send text messages, even though there are so many other richer ways we can communicate with each other.”

Great, when will it happen?
Meta already owns virtual reality headset maker Oculus.

And the firm launched experimental versions of two metaverse projects last year – Horizon World, which lets friends meet virtually, and Horizon Workrooms, which enables virtual work meetings.

At the Facebook Connect event where Mr Zuckerberg spoke about the metaverse he also teased a new high-end headset dubbed Project Cambria.

But the metaverse is a work in progress, and the company says fully realising the idea will take another 10 to 15 years.

Meta will spend billions of dollars to bring it to life. The company recently announced it is hiring 10,000 people in the European Union to work on the project.

Mr Zuckerberg also said the metaverse would be the work of more than one company, and that “open standards and interoperability” will need to be part of it.

How safe and private is the metaverse?
After all the leaks, and accusations levelled at Facebook of late, will people trust the world that Mr Zuckerberg built to keep them safe, and their data private?

The Guardian suggested that advertisers might target ads based on “your body language, your physiological responses, knowing who you are interacting with and how”.

Mike Proulx, research director at research company Forrester, said: “Without trust, Meta’s metaverse plans are already at risk.”

Mr Zuckerberg and Meta colleague Nick Clegg, Britain’s former deputy prime minister, have sought to address concerns.

Mr Clegg noted there were years to get regulation and technology right, while Mr Zuckerberg said: “Privacy and safety need to be built into the metaverse from day one.”

Whistleblower Frances Haugen told the BBC that “over and over again, we see Facebook prioritising expansion and growth”. She felt the resources could be better used on improving the safety of Facebook.

Facebook responded that it has no commercial or moral incentive to do anything other than give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible.

Meta: Facebook’s new name ridiculed by Hebrew speakers

Facebook’s announcement that it is changing its name to Meta has caused quite the stir in Israel where the word sounds like the Hebrew word for “dead”.

To be precise, Meta is pronounced like the feminine form of the Hebrew word.

A number of people have taken to Twitter to share their take on the name under the hashtag #FacebookDead.

The emergency rescue volunteers Zaka even got involved, telling their followers on Twitter: “Don’t worry, we’re on it”.

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Another Twitter user said: “Thank you for providing all Hebrew speakers a good reason to laugh.”

Facebook isn’t the only company to be ridiculed over translations of its branding.

Here are a few examples of when things got lost in translation.

‘Eat your fingers off’
When KFC arrived in China during the 80s, its motto “finger lickin’ good” didn’t exactly go down well with the locals.

The motto’s translation in Mandarin was “eat your fingers off”.

But it didn’t harm the company too much. KFC is one of the largest fast food chains in the country.

‘Manure’
Rolls-Royce changed the name of its Silver Mist car as mist translates as “excrement” in German.

The car was named Silver Shadow instead.

Meanwhile when Nokia released its Lumia phone in 2011, it didn’t exactly get the reaction it was expecting.

In Spanish, Lumia is a synonym for a prostitute, although it apparently only appears in dialects with a heavy gypsy influence.

Honda however had a lucky escape. It almost named its new car the Fitta, which is a vulgar description for vagina in Swedish. It apparently did not translate well in a number of other languages.

Apparently the issue was detected early on and a decision was made to name the vehicle Jazz in most countries.

Inside the controversial US gunshot-detection firm

ShotSpotter’s incident-review room is like any other call centre.

Analysts wearing headsets sit by computer screens, listening intently.

Yet the people working here have an extraordinary responsibility.

They make the final decision on whether a computer algorithm has correctly identified a gunshot – and whether to dispatch the police.

Making the wrong call has serious consequences.

ShotSpotter has garnered much negative press over the last year. Allegations that range from its tech not being accurate, to claims that ShotSpotter is fuelling discrimination in the police.

In the wake of those negative news stories, the company gave BBC News access to its national incident-review centre.

ShotSpotter is trying to solve a genuine problem.

“What makes the system so compelling, we believe, is a full 80-95% of gunfire goes unreported,” chief executive Ralph Clark says.

People don’t report gunshots for several reasons – they may be unsure what they have heard, think someone else will call 911 or simply lack trust in the police.

So ShotSpotter’s founders had an idea. What if they could bypass the 911 process altogether?

They came up with a system.

Microphones are fixed to structures around a neighbourhood. When a loud bang is detected, a computer analyses the sound and classifies it as either a gunshot or something else. A human analyst then steps in to review the decision.

In the incident-review room, former teacher Ginger Ammon allows me to sit with her as she analyses these decisions in real time.

Every time the algorithm flags a potential shot, it makes a “ping” sound.

Ms Ammon first listens to the recording herself and then studies the waveform it produces on her computer screen.

“We’re looking to see how many sensors picked it up and if the sensors made a directional pattern, because, in theory, a gunshot can only travel in one direction,” she says.

Once confident a shot has been fired, Ms Ammon clicks a button that dispatches police officers to the scene.

It all happens in under 60 seconds.

“It kind of feels like you’re playing a computer game,” I say.

“That is a comment that we get frequently,” she replies.

ShotSpotter’s successes
There are clear examples of ShotSpotter working.

In April 2017, black supremacist Kori Ali Muhammad went on a murderous rampage in Fresno, California.

Trying to kill as many white men as possible, he walked around a suburban neighbourhood, picking off targets.

The police were receiving 911 calls – but they were delayed and unspecific.

Yet ShotSpotter was able to indicate to officers Muhammad’s route.

After three minutes – and three murders – Muhammad was apprehended.

Fresno police believe without ShotStopper, he would have killed more.

“ShotSpotter gave us the path he took,” says Lt Bill Dooley.

The company has been hugely successful at convincing police forces to adopt its technology.

Its microphones are in more than 100 cities across America – and for years, the technology was considered uncontroversial.

That all changed with George Floyd’s murder, as people became more interested in the technology so many police forces were using.

ShotSpotter is too expensive for the police to roll out across a city.

Instead, microphones are often placed in inner-city areas – areas with higher black populations.

So if the technology isn’t as accurate as claimed, it could be having a disproportionate impact on those communities.

Suddenly, ShotSpotter was in the spotlight.

Accuracy Concerns
ShotSpotter claims to be 97% accurate. That would mean that the police can be pretty confident that when a ShotSpotter alert happens – they are almost certainly responding to a gunshot.

But that claim is exactly that, a claim. It’s hard to see how ShotSpotter knows it’s that accurate – at least not with the public information it has released.

And if it isn’t, it could have wide consequences for American justice.

The first problem with that accuracy claim is that it’s often difficult to tell, on the ground, whether a shot has been fired.

When Chicago’s Inspector General investigated, they found that in only 9% of ShotSpotter alerts was there any physical evidence of a gunshot.

“It’s a low number,” the city’s Deputy Inspector General for Public Safety, Deborah Witzburgh, says.

That means in 91% of police responses to ShotSpotter alerts, it’s difficult to say definitively that a gun was fired. That’s not to say there was no gunshot, but hard to prove that there was.

Gunfire sounds very similar to a firecracker, or car backfiring.

So how is ShotSpotter so confident that it’s nearly 100% accurate? It’s something I ask Mr Clark.

“We rely on ground truth from agencies to tell us when we miss, when we miss detections or when we miss-classify,” he tells me.

But critics say that methodology has a fundamental flaw. If the police are unsure whether a gunshot has been fired, they are not going to tell the company it was wrong.

In other words, say critics, the company has been counting “don’t knows”, ‘”maybes”, and “probablys” as “got it rights”.

Chicago defence lawyer Brendan Max says the company’s accuracy claims are “marketing nonsense”.

“Customer feedback is used to decide whether people like Pepsi or Coke better,” he says.

“It’s not designed to determine whether a scientific method works.”

Conor Healy, who analyses security systems for video-surveillance research group IPVM, is also deeply sceptical about the 97% accuracy figure.

“Putting the onus on the police to report every false positive means you expect them to report on stuff, when nothing’s happened… which they’re unlikely to do,” Mr Healy says.

“It’s fair to assume that if they [ShotSpotter] have solid testing data to back up their claims, they have every incentive to release that data.”

Gun crime on the rise
Back in Fresno I join the police on a night-time ride-along with police officer Nate Palomino.

Fresno has some of California’s worst gun crime, and just like many other cities in America it’s been getting worse in the last two years.

Sure enough, a ShotSpotter alert comes through. However, when we reach the scene, no casings are found and there’s no physical evidence of a gunshot.

Officer Palomino tells me the audio recording sounds like a gunshot – and it seems more than possible it was – but it’s difficult to prove.

He says that scenario is typical.

ShotSpotter’s accuracy should be beyond doubt.

It has been used in courts up and down the country as evidence for both defence and prosecution.

The worry is that if it isn’t as accurate as is claimed, ShotSpotter is sending officers into situations wrongly expecting gunfire.

Alyxander Godwin, who has been campaigning to get rid of ShotSpotter in Chicago, summarises the concern.

“The police are expecting these situations to be hostile,” she says.

“They expect there to be a gun, and because of where this is deployed, they’re expecting a black or brown person to be holding a gun.”

But ShotSpotter says there is no data to back this theory up.

“What you’d be describing is a situation where officers get to a scene and they’re basically shooting unarmed people,” Mr Clark says.

“It’s just not in the data – it’s speculation.”

Yet he seems to also accept that the company’s own accuracy methodology has its limitations.

“It might be a fair criticism to say, ‘Hey, look, you’re not getting all the feedback that you might possibly get,'” Mr Clark says.

“That might be a fair criticism.”

Mr Max, the Chicago lawyer, says ShotSpotter reports should not be allowed as evidence in court until the company can better back up its claims.

“In the last four or five months, I’m aware of dozens of Chicagoans who have been arrested based on ShotSpotter evidence,” he says.

“I’m sure that has played out in cities across the country.”

He also says the company should open its systems up to better review and analysis.

For example, who is independently reviewing the quality of the analysts? And how often does the algorithm disagree with the human analyst?

Certainly, from my time at the ShotSpotter incident review centre, it’s common for analysts to disagree with the computer classification.

“It’s just filtering out what we see,” Ms Ammon says.

“But I honestly don’t even look at it [the classification], I’m so busy looking at the sensor patterns.”

It’s an interesting admission. Sometimes, the technology is viewed as all seeing, all knowing – the computer masterfully detecting a gunshot.

In practice, the analysts have a far greater role than I expected.

Lawyers such as Brendan Max are interested in trying to establish more information about how the technology works in court.

Saving lives
ShotSpotter has had a lot of criticism over the past year – not all of it fair.

And much of the coverage casually skips over the fact that police forces often give glowing reviews of the technology’s effectiveness.

The company is keen to highlight cases where ShotSpotter has alerted police to gunshot victims, for example, saving lives.

In several cities across America, activists are trying to persuade cities to pull ShotSpotter contracts.

But in other places, ShotSpotter is expanding.

In Fresno, police chief Paco Balderrama is looking to increase its coverage, at a cost of $1m (£0.7m) a year.

“What if ShotSpotter only saves one life in a given year? Is it worth a million dollars? I would argue it is,” he says.

The debate around ShotSpotter is hugely complex – and has important potential ramifications for community policing in America.

It’s unlikely to go away until the tech’s accuracy is independently verified and the data peer reviewed.

Start-up launches £495,000 hoverbike in Japan

A Japanese start-up is hoping to convince motorists to swap their cars for a $680,000 (£495,000) hoverbike.

ALI Technologies’ XTurismo Limited Edition went on sale in Japan, earlier on Wednesday.

Electronics giant Mitsubishi and footballer Keisuke Honda are two backers of the Tokyo-based company.

ALI Technologies says the hoverbike can fly for 40 minutes at up to 100km/h (62mph) on a single charge.

The company aims to have manufactured 200 single-rider 300kg (47-stone) hoverbikes by mid-2022.

Each is equipped with a conventional engine and four battery-powered motors.

“Until now, the choice has been to move on the ground or at scale in the sky,” ALI Technologies chief executive Daisuke Katano said.

“We hope to offer a new method of movement.”

Overcrowding is a big problem for Tokyo’s 13.5 million residents.

The high-tech city is the most populous metropolitan area in the world.

But current laws will prohibit the hoverbikes from flying over Japan’s busy roads.

Although, Mr Katano hopes rescue teams will use them to reach inaccessible areas.

‘Science fiction’
Ben Gardner, of Pinsent Masons, told BBC News vehicles that once seemed like the far-distant future were becoming more tangible every year.

“Ultimately, there is scope for us to see the vehicle being deployed in the UK,” he said.

The hoverbike would not be considered roadworthy under current UK law.

But Mr Gardner said a focus on new technologies in recent years could be signalling a change.

“The current trialling of emerging technologies such as driverless cars, autonomous robots and drones shows there is a blueprint for new forms of transport to move out of the realms of science fiction and into the real world,” he said.

Venture capitalists, aviation corporations and even rideshare company Uber, with its ambitious Uber Elevate, are staking claims on the burgeoning flying automotive industry, which analysts say could be worth as much as $1.5tn by 2040.