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"Neural networks can find telltale patterns in a person's gait that can be used to recognize and identify them with almost perfect accuracy, according to new research published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. The new system, called SfootBD, is nearly 380 times more accurate than previous methods, and it doesn't require a person to go barefoot in order to work. It's less invasive than other behavioral biometric verification systems, such as retinal scanners or fingerprinting, but its passive nature could make it a bigger privacy concern, since it could be used covertly."

"Many studies like these describe heavy users as addicted to smartphones. But the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official guidebook for psychiatric diagnoses released in 2013, does not view smartphones as addictive. The manual separates behavioral and substance-use problems for the first time, but online gambling is the only behavioral addiction recognized by the DSM-5, as it's called."

"Mozilla has announced it will make the tool, called DNS-over-HTTPS, or DoH, the default for all users in the US."

"That was apparently the result of the US government's probing of visa applicants' social media profiles. After the search, an officer questioned the 17-year-old, who got a scholarship to study in the US, about his friends' social media activity and told him she'd found some "posting political points of view that oppose the US," the student paper noted. Despite Ajjawi's protests, the officer denied the student's entry and let him call his parents."

"Interest in so-called dazzle camouflage appears to have grown substantially since the Metropolitan police announced last week that officers will be using live facial recognition cameras on London's streets - a move described by privacy campaigners and political activists as "dangerous", "oppressive" and "a huge threat to human rights"."

"A hacker has stolen millions of user account details from popular education platform Edmodo, and the data is apparently for sale on the so-called dark web. Teachers, students and parents use Edmodo to work on lesson plans, assign homework, and more. The organization claims to have over 78 million members."

"That's the crux of the problem. While you can legislate to only give state agencies access to terrorists' communications, and with proper oversight and authorisation, you cannot actually build encryption that works like that. If you put a backdoor in, it's there not just for security services to exploit, but for cyber-criminals, oppressive regimes and anyone else."

"The lack of answers the Jacksonville sheriff's office have provided in Lynch's case is representative of the problems that facial recognition poses across the country. "It's considered an imperfect biometric," said Garvie, who in 2016 created a study on facial recognition software, published by the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, called The Perpetual Line-Up. "There's no consensus in the scientific community that it provides a positive identification of somebody.""

"TikTok has been urged to take action over a flood of videos shared in Myanmar that feature men in military uniform threatening to kill anti-coup protesters, at times while brandishing weapons. Myanmar's police and army have been widely condemned for using lethal force against peaceful protesters who have held mass rallies over recent weeks calling for the return of democracy. "

"Alexa, Call Mom! leads participants through an immersive séance experience. It is a parodic reimaging of the classic horror séance and an exploration of the tense relationships we share with conversational devices in our home."

"There, a Facebook-fuelled tsunami of lies had assisted an authoritarian into power. And she had seen where that had led: to opponents of the state being killed in their homes or turning up dead in ditches. As a Filipino American with a foot in both countries - she calls herself "the first of the CNN hybrids" - she was perfectly positioned to warn America about what happens when a populist president is allowed to spread out-of-control lies across a vast, unregulated tech platform. "A lie told a million times becomes a fact," she repeated again and again."

"In 2015, a research group fed an AI system called Deep Patient health and medical data from some 700,000 people, and tested whether it could predict diseases. It could, but Deep Patient provides no explanation for the basis of a diagnosis, and the researchers have no idea how it comes to its conclusions. A doctor either can either trust or ignore the computer, but that trust will remain blind."

"The researchers programmed a robot called Pepper, made by SoftBank Robotics, with the ability to vocalise its thought processes. This means the robot is no longer a "black box" and its underlying decision-making is more transparent to the user."

"But Chia's replacement for bitcoin's energy-intensive "proof of work" system, called "proof of space and time", instead requires users to devote massive amounts of hard drive space to generating and storing random numbers, with rewards doled out to those with the most space used up"

"Beginning in 2017, I did a project with artist Trevor Paglen to look at how people were being labelled. We found horrifying classificatory terms that were misogynist, racist, ableist, and judgmental in the extreme. Pictures of people were being matched to words like kleptomaniac, alcoholic, bad person, closet queen, call girl, slut, drug addict and far more I cannot say here. ImageNet has now removed many of the obviously problematic people categories - certainly an improvement - however, the problem persists because these training sets still circulate on torrent sites [where files are shared between peers]."

"By then, calls over social media for crowds to gather in areas of Cairo, and converge in public spaces had built an unstoppable momentum. "Social media was the most important tool in the revolution," said Abdelkarim. "People could communicate very easily and express themselves without any censorship." Mubarak's police state was over run by dissenters with smartphones and Facebook accounts."

" The children's charity NSPCC has called on Facebook to resume a programme that scanned private messages for indications of child abuse, with new data suggesting that almost half of referrals for child sexual abuse material are now falling below the radar. Recent changes to the European commission's e-privacy directive, which are being finalised, require messaging services to follow strict new restrictions on the privacy of message data. Facebook blamed that directive for shutting down the child protection operation, but the children's charity says Facebook has gone too far in reading the law as banning it entirely."

"In these cases, we call the SDKs "trackers" or "tracker SDKs." We follow the lead of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, and other digital rights organizations and use the term broadly: "Trackers" encompasses traditional advertisement surveillance, behavioral, and location monitoring. Legitimate uses may include user feedback mechanisms, telemetry, and crash reporters. App developers have decided to include tracker SDKs in apps for a variety of reasons, and we do not categorize all usage of trackers as malicious or condemn the app authors. Additionally, given the complexity and pace of software development, some developers may not be aware that trackers are in their app or may not know the full implications of bundling such code before publishing."

"Whereas most machine learning algorithms can't hone their skills beyond an initial training period, the researchers say the new approach, called a liquid neural network, has a kind of built-in "neuroplasticity." That is, as it goes about its work-say, in the future, maybe driving a car or directing a robot-it can learn from experience and adjust its connections on the fly."

"Now, there's a new concern: malicious apps developed by third parties and hosted by Amazon or Google. The threat isn't just theoretical. Whitehat hackers at Germany's Security Research Labs developed eight apps-four Alexa "skills" and four Google Home "actions"-that all passed Amazon or Google security-vetting processes. The skills or actions posed as simple apps for checking horoscopes, with the exception of one, which masqueraded as a random-number generator. Behind the scenes, these "smart spies," as the researchers call them, surreptitiously eavesdropped on users and phished for their passwords."