Three residents filed a lawsuit this week against Sonoma County seeking to block code enforcement from using drones to take aerial images of their homes in what the American Civil Liberties Union is calling a "runaway spying operation." The lawsuit, filed by the ACLU Wednesday on behalf of the three residents, alleges that the county began using drones with high-powered cameras and zoom lenses in 2019 to track illegal cannabis cultivation, but in the years since, officials have used the devices more than 700 times to find other code violations on private property without first seeking a warrant. "For too long, Sonoma County code enforcement has used high-powered drones to warrantlessly sift through people's private affairs and initiate charges that upend lives and livelihoods. All the while, the county has hidden these unlawful searches from the people they have spied on, the community, and the media," Matt Cagle, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, said in a statement. A spokesperson for Sonoma County said the county is reviewing the complaint and takes "the allegations very seriously."

The value assessment of private properties is an attractive but challenging task which is widely concerned by a majority of people around the world. A prolonged topic among us is ``\textit{how much is my house worth?}''. To answer this question, most experienced agencies would like to price a property given the factors of its attributes as well as the demographics and the public facilities around it. However, no one knows the exact prices of these factors, especially the values of public facilities which may help assess private properties. In this paper, we introduce our newly launched project ``Monopoly'' (named after a classic board game) in which we propose a distributed approach for revaluing private properties by learning to price public facilities (such as hospitals etc.) with the large-scale urban data we have accumulated via Baidu Maps. To be specific, our method organizes many points of interest (POIs) into an undirected weighted graph and formulates multiple factors including the virtual prices of surrounding public facilities as adaptive variables to parallelly estimate the housing prices we know. Then the prices of both public facilities and private properties can be iteratively updated according to the loss of prediction until convergence. We have conducted extensive experiments with the large-scale urban data of several metropolises in China. Results show that our approach outperforms several mainstream methods with significant margins. Further insights from more in-depth discussions demonstrate that the ``Monopoly'' is an innovative application in the interdisciplinary field of business intelligence and urban computing, and it will be beneficial to tens of millions of our users for investments and to the governments for urban planning as well as taxation.

Los Angeles – A mysterious metal monolith found in the remote desert of the western United States, sparking a national guessing game over how it got there, has apparently disappeared, officials said. The Bureau of Land Management in Utah said Saturday it had received "credible reports" that the object had been removed "by an unknown party" on Friday evening. The bureau "did not remove the structure which is considered private property," it said in a statement. "We do not investigate crimes involving private property which are handled by the local sheriff's office." The shiny, triangular pillar which protruded some 12 feet from the red rocks of southern Utah, was spotted on Nov. 18 by baffled local officials counting bighorn sheep from the air.

Data is turning out to be more valuable than we thought. Google and Facebook's ad revenues exceeded $200 billion last year. They can hope to have a bigger source of income soon, thanks to the income generated by the Artificial Intelligence (AI) business built using the data of billions of individuals. No wonder, getting hold of data by paying top dollars is the new game in the digital world. This may explain the sudden investments of Google, Facebook, Intel, and many others in India, one of the largest data generators of the world.

WASHINGTON - Blacksburg was already well prepared when the U.S. government announced in April that the Virginia town would be home to the country's first commercial drone delivery service. Virginia Tech University, based in Blacksburg, has for years hosted a major drone development program, which has carried out experimental deliveries of ice cream, fast food and more. "I moved (to Blacksburg) last August, and when I was telling people I was moving, they said, 'I know somebody there had their Chipotle (Mexican restaurant chain) delivered by drone!' " said Megan Duncan, a communications professor at Virginia Tech. So, when Wing became the first drone company to be approved as an air carrier by the federal government, allowing the Google parent company Alphabet Inc. to start drone deliveries in and around Blacksburg, many of the locals were excited, Duncan said. "I think there's superinteresting possibilities for remote areas that are underserved, particularly with people who need prescriptions and can't make a 45-minute drive," she said by phone.

Rodd Moesel, president of the Oklahoma Farm Bureau, said his organization is closely monitoring the proposed legislative measure to determine any unintended effects. The bureau's members feel any unknown drone flying below 250 feet (75 meters) is trespassing on private property, he said. Moesel also asserted members are worried about strangers using drones as "peeping toms," or to case property to steal animals and trailers.

All this fuss is not without good reason. They make oxygen for breathing, suck up CO₂, provide shade, reduce noise pollution, and just look at them -- they're beautiful! The thing is, though, that trees are pretty hard to map. The 124,795 trees in the San Francisco Urban Forest Map shown below, for example, were cataloged over a year of survey work by a team of certified arborists. The database they created is thorough, with information on tree species and size as well as environmental factors like the presence of power lines or broken pavement.

No stranger to controversy, a Tony Stark reincarnate -- Elon Musk -- came out with an ominous prediction recently. "Forget North Korea, AI will start World War III" read the CNN headline. Elon Musk is not alone in fearing unintended consequences of the race to develop algorithms that we may or may not be able to control. Once a new technology is introduced it can't be uninvented -- Sam Harris points out in his viral TED talk. He argues that it'll be impossible to halt the pace of progress, even if humankind could collectively make such a decision.

Drone use across the U.S. is soaring, and the skies may soon get even more crowded, as the Federal Aviation Administration expects sales of these unmanned aerial vehicles to jump to seven million in 2020 from about 2.5 million this year. Interest in drones for both commercial and casual purposes is raising not only safety and privacy concerns, but also thorny legal questions about where and when drones should be allowed to fly--and who gets to decide. On one side are those who say property owners' rights generally extend up about 500 feet, which gives them the right to prevent drones from flying or hovering over their land. They say drones pose a much bigger threat to security and privacy than jets and airplanes, which travel at higher altitudes, in airspace regulated by the FAA. They say drones represent the next frontier in aviation, and as such, decisions about where and when they can fly should be made collectively, not by landowners through tort law.