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The case of Apple versus Gizmodo takes new twist as state lawyers consider the legality of the raid.

When you're trying to keep something a secret, it may not be a good idea to take it out into the public and lose it. It might not also be a good idea to take it and post about it, even if you are Gizmodo.

"Chinese police say they used facial recognition to identify, then arrest a man attending a crowded concert in Nanchang, China's third largest city. South China Morning Post reports that security cameras equipped with the software pinpointed the man out of the estimated 50,000 other people also in attendance at the concert. "

"The mapping information could ostensibly tell third-parties when the owners are most often home, the shape of rooms, the size of houses, and even the frequency of cleanings. Gizmodo imagines that a room's shape could be valuable to Amazon as information on the acoustics of a room containing an Alexa device, informing both volume and directional settings so that its broadcasting and microphone can work properly. "

"Staying on the subject of "we live in a dystopian digital hellscape": a Gizmodo investigation identified 32 data brokers selling access to the unique mobile IDs of people pegged as "actively pregnant" or "shopping for maternity products". At least one company was also offering access to a catalogue of people using the same sorts of emergency contraceptives that some Republican's want to outlaw or restrict."

"The Register reports that security firm Zscaler was first to spot the app, which presents itself as a normal video playing app, albeit for playing videos of an adult nature. Apparently once it has silently snapped photos of its victim it will display a message on screen demanding that they pay $500 . Otherwise, well... do you want people knowing you've used the app?"

Looks like Microsoft's Project Natal is more advanced than most of us thought. It effectively tracks bodily movements, even in low-light conditions.

My main concern isn't about what it does (even though it is quite odd), but how successful it will be.

""The fake page is actually hosted on Google's servers and is served over SSL, making the page even more convincing," Symantec security expert Nick Johnston explained in a blog post. "The scammers have simply created a folder inside a Google Drive account, marked it as public, uploaded a file there, and then used Google Drive's preview feature to get a publicly accessible URL to include in their messages.""

"The founders of Predictim want to be clear with me: Their product-an algorithm that scans the online footprint of a prospective babysitter to determine their "risk" levels for parents-is not racist. It is not biased. "We take ethics and bias extremely seriously," Sal Parsa, Predictim's CEO, tells me warily over the phone. "In fact, in the last 18 months we trained our product, our machine, our algorithm to make sure it was ethical and not biased. We took sensitive attributes, protected classes, sex, gender, race, away from our training set. We continuously audit our model. And on top of that we added a human review process.""

"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."

"We have become symbiotic with these machines. We feed them with energy and data, and they reward us with a host of services. But our relationship with them goes deeper. There are multiple layers of feedback loops as we shape algorithms and they shape us, at the individual and collective levels. What framework can we turn to to analyze this complex ecosystem?"

"Curtin University internet studies professor Tama Leaver posted about some of his tests with Emu's sticker generation to X, formerly known as Twitter. Leaver found, for example, that the AI will block a phrase like "child with gun" and display a warning message about how the prompt doesn't follow Meta's Community Guidelines. Emu will, however, generate stickers with the similar, more niche prompt "child with grenade." It not only creates stickers of kids holding the weapon but also produces stickers of children holding guns."