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"Facebook said on Thursday it had taken down about 200 accounts run by a group of hackers in Iran as part of a cyber-spying operation that targeted mostly US military personnel and people working at defense and aerospace companies. The social media company said the group, dubbed "Tortoiseshell" by security experts, used fake online personas to connect with targets, build trust - sometimes over the course of several months - and drive them to other sites, where they were tricked into clicking malicious links that would infect their devices with spying malware."

"That can include statistical or machine learning algorithms that rely on police records detailing the time, location, and nature of past crimes in a bid to predict if, when, where, and who may commit future infractions. In theory, this should help authorities use resources more wisely and spend more time policing certain neighborhoods that they think will yield higher crime rates."

"The answer is simple: nobody, including opinion pollsters, knew about the Trump campaign's astonishing mastery of social media, especially Facebook. Trump may not have known much about that at the time - he really only understood Twitter - but Brad Parscale and his team sure knew how to make use of Facebook's micro-targeting machine. And they did."

"There are currently no usable photo data sets of mask-wearing people that can be used to train and evaluate facial recognition systems. The NIST study addressed this problem by superimposing masks (of various colours, sizes and positions) over images of faces, as seen here:"

""The AI will be trained to detect incidents such as people fighting, a group of agitated persons, people following someone else, and arguments or other abnormal behaviour," SMART lecturer and team lead Johan Barthelemy said. "It can also identify an unsafe environment, such as where there is a lack of lighting.The system will then alert a human operator who can quickly react if there is an issue.""

"But those same services have also enabled the creation of what one professional factchecker calls a "perfect storm for misinformation". And with real-life interaction suppressed to counter the spread of the virus, it's easier than ever for people to fall deep down a rabbit hole of deception, where the endpoint may not simply be a decline in vaccination rates or the election of an unpleasant president, but the end of consensus reality as we know it. What happens when your basic understanding of the world is no longer the same as your neighbour's? And can Facebook stop that fate coming to us all?"

"The use of AI in military applications - such as small anti-personnel weapons - is of particular concern, he said. "Those are the ones that are very easily scalable, meaning you could put a million of them in a single truck and you could open the back and off they go and wipe out a whole city," said Russell."

"But the reporters in those videos aren't real. Their names are Daren and Noah, and they're computer-generated avatars crafted by Synthesia, a London-based artificial intelligence company. The clips are from a YouTube channel called House of News, which presents itself as an English-language media outlet. Researchers say the videos are part of the Venezuelan government's attempts to spin the narrative on social media, considered one of the last bastions of free speech in a nation where outlets are censored and journalists are often persecuted. The incorporation of AI, experts told The Washington Post, seems to be a new addition to the government's disinformation campaigns, which range from incentivizing Twitter users to post specific talking points to using bots that spit out the regime's messaging."

"Keyword-based filtering allows blocking of sites and texts containing candidates' names and slogans, say security experts"

"It's clear that surveillance affects a broad group of people, with real painful consequences for their lives. We've seen journalists being monitored, lawyers having their client confidentiality broken, victims of police misconduct being spied on and environmental campaigns infiltrated. These people are not criminals, and yet when we have a system of mass surveillance, they become targets for increasingly intrusive powers. "

"Just ahead of the first anniversary of its release, Indian law enforcers are accusing the popular game of inciting violence and distracting kids from their studies, even pushing for a large-scale prohibition of the "battle-royal" style shooter. Following numerous complaints by parents, a temporary ban on the mobile app was first announced by police in metropolitan Rajkot, with some other cities multiplayer-game soon following suit. While the current ban only extends until March 30, the police and children's rights watchdog are petitioning New Delhi to ban the game altogether"

"Launched in response to terror attacks in New Zealand in May, where a lone gunman killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch while livestreaming the massacre on Facebook, it calls for the "effective enforcement" of laws prohibiting the dissemination of terrorist content. It also states that all action on the issue must be consistent with the principles of a free, open and secure Internet, without compromising freedom of expression."

"The Court found that the fundamental right to privacy is greater than the economic interest of the commercial firm and, in some circumstances, the public interest interest in access to Information. The European Court affirmed the judgment of the Spanish Data Protection Agency which upheld press freedoms and rejected a request to have the article concerning personal bankruptcy removed from the web site of the press organization."

"And these machines' vulnerabilities to hacking are "terrifying", Sarah Teale, co-director along with Simon Ardizzone and Russell Michaels, told the Guardian. America's current election infrastructure is, as Kill Chain explains, a prescription for disaster - an outdated, willfully naive system no more prepared for attack than four years ago."

"The UK's information commissioner just told a parliamentary subcommittee on online harms and disinformation that a secret arrangement between her office and Facebook prevents her from publicly answering whether or not Facebook contacted the ICO about completing a much-trumpeted 'app audit'."

"Employees worry that, should Signal fail to build policies and enforcement mechanisms to identify and remove bad actors, the fallout could bring more negative attention to encryption technologies from regulators at a time when their existence is threatened around the world. "The world needs products like Signal - but they also need Signal to be thoughtful," said Gregg Bernstein, a former user researcher who left the organization this month over his concerns. "It's not only that Signal doesn't have these policies in place. But they've been resistant to even considering what a policy might look like.""

"The CCPA exempted many forms of targeted advertising, essentially permitting the collection and sharing of personal user data without consent-precisely the activity the law was intended to eliminate. CCPA also left enforcement solely to the already overburdened state attorney general, a concession that caused an ongoing rift between two of its authors, Mary Stone Ross and Alastair Mactaggart. (Mactaggart coauthored the CPRA, which Ross opposed.)"

"The decision will be the most consequential yet made by Facebook's Oversight Board, a group of 20 members who range from humanitarian activists and religious experts to lawyers and a former prime minister. The board, which launched in late 2020, is meant to function as an independent arm of the social platform, making binding decisions on a selection of its thorniest content moderation issues."

"As a society, we should care not just about how much innovation takes place, but also about the types of new technologies that are developed. We ought to ensure we are investing in technologies that are safe, environmentally sound, empower rather than simply replace human labor, and are consistent with democratic values and human rights."

"Facebook and Twitter took steps on Wednesday to limit the spread of a controversial New York Post article critical of Joe Biden, sparking outrage among conservatives and stoking debate over how social media platforms should tackle misinformation ahead of the US election"