Public Service Internet

Sex toy company admits its vibrators secretly recorded intimate sessions

A couple of years ago, I was heavily involved in analysing and reporting on the massive VTech hack, the one where millions of records were exposed including kids' names, genders, ages, photos and the relationship to parents' records which included their home address. Part of this data was collected via an IoT device called the InnoTab which is a wifi connected tablet designed for young kids; think Fisher Price designing an iPad... then totally screwing up the security.

Kromtech Security Researchers have discovered another publically accessible Amazon S3 repository. This time it contained medical data in 316,363 PDF reports in the form of weekly blood test results. Many of these were multiple reports on individual patients. It appears that each patient had weekly test results totaling around 20 files each. That would still be an estimated 150,000+ people affected by the leak.

The blind application of machine learning runs the risk of amplifying biases present in data. Such a danger is facing us with word embedding, a popular framework to represent text data as vectors which has been used in many machine learning and natural language processing tasks. We show that even word embeddings trained on Google News articles exhibit female/male gender stereotypes to a disturbing extent. This raises concerns because their widespread use, as we describe, often tends to amplify these biases. Geometrically, gender bias is first shown to be captured by a direction in the word embedding. Second, gender neutral words are shown to be linearly separable from gender definition words in the word embedding. Using these properties, we provide a methodology for modifying an embedding to remove gender stereotypes, such as the association between between the words receptionist and female, while maintaining desired associations such as between the words queen and female. We define metrics to quantify both direct and indirect gender biases in embeddings, and develop algorithms to "debias" the embedding. Using crowd-worker evaluation as well as standard benchmarks, we empirically demonstrate that our algorithms significantly reduce gender bias in embeddings while preserving the its useful properties such as the ability to cluster related concepts and to solve analogy tasks. The resulting embeddings can be used in applications without amplifying gender bias.

Coca-Cola, Hyundai, Samsung and L'Oréal have all signed up to the new screen, which can recognise vehicle make, model and colour to target adverts

Users should be aware of why people use Facebook to avoid feelings of envy

The timeline below identifies key developments on tech platforms used by journalism publishers. Here you can explore the significant shifts in the platform landscape as these companies adjust to new relationships with publishers.

South Park writers Trey Parker and Matt Stone haven't ever really shied away from social commentary (president Donald Trump notwithstanding) and that doesn't look like it's changing with the upcoming South Park: The Fractured but Whole. When creating your character in the make-believe superhero game, Eurogamer discovered that the darker the skin tone you choose, the more the difficulty level ramps up. "Don't worry, this doesn't affect combat, just every other aspect of your life," perpetual jerk Eric Cartman says in voiceover.

An algorithm deduced the sexuality of people on a dating site with up to 91% accuracy, raising tricky ethical questions

Is your digital assistant taking orders behind your back? Scientists from China's Zheijiang University have proved it's possible, publishing new research that demonstrates how Siri, Alexa, and other voice-activated programs can be controlled using inaudible ultrasound commands.

London's Metropolitan Police have been urged to back down on plans to once again use facial recognition software at next weekend's Notting Hill Carnival. Privacy groups including Big Brother Watch, Liberty and Privacy International have written to police commissioner Cressida Dick (PDF) calling for a U-turn on the use of the tech. Automated facial recognition technology will snap the party-goers' faces, and run them against a database. The aim is to alert cops to people who are banned from the festival or are wanted by the police, presumably so they can take immediate action. The tech was first tested at the festival - where relations between police and revellers are often strained - last year, but it failed to identify anyone.

To celebrate its fifth birthday, Philips is extending the compatibility of its smart lights to sync with media

All the Secret Stuff That Happens When You Visit Google.com

"Over the past couple of years, Roombas haven't just been picking up dust and chauffeuring cats around, they've also been mapping the layout of your home. Now, Colin Angle, the chief executive of Roomba maker iRobot, has said he wants to sell the data from these maps in order to improve the future of smart home technology."

" Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3. Track and control all devices at home and automate control. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi. "

"The big companies developing them show no interest in fixing the problem."