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"Vivian Balakrishnan on why he had earlier said that TraceTogether app data would only be used for COVID-19 contact tracing. The Home Affairs Ministry has since said the data could be used for criminal investigations."

"  The Immigration & Checkpoints Authority (ICA) has been progressively implementing more secure and efficient immigration clearance, in collaboration with the Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX). Since July 2020, all automated and manual immigration lanes and counters at the passenger halls of Singapore's land, sea and air checkpoints have been equipped with iris and facial scanners"

"Before Covid-19, many of us thought remote working sounded blissful. Now, employees across the world long for chats by the coffee machine and the whirr of printers"

"Instagram turned our phones into adult pacifiers. At first, this was a tranquillising reel of pretty pictures, pumped in a steady stream with each thumb-swipe. Like a warm milky drink, but of sunsets and puppies and toes in the sand. Later, and more insidiously, the dopamine hit shifted to refreshing your feed to see how many likes your own pictures had. Either way, we had got ourselves in a feedback loop of attention-seeking in which our emotions were channelled from our brains to our phones and back again. Twitter is about your tribe, Facebook is about home and family, but Instagram is a romance between just you and your phone."

"Chess has enjoyed a huge boom in internet play this year as in-person events have moved online and people stuck at home have sought new hobbies. But with that has come a significant new problem: a rise in the use of powerful chess calculators to cheat on a scale reminiscent of the scandals that have dogged cycling and athletics. One leading 'chess detective' said that the pandemic was "without doubt creating a crisis"."

"According to the report, Twitter's security "problems" were only exacerbated by the push to remote work necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic. Like many other newly remote workers, Twitter's employees experienced tech problems working from home. Hackers were able to capitalize on this, tricking at least one Twitter employee into believing the hacker was a member of Twitter's IT team."

"This is the dark, flamboyant humour beloved of the "stan" culture of pop superfans, and in this case, quite funny. But another attack on Jillian Mapes, Pitchfork's reviewer, was very serious: "Contact info both old and current was leaked, down to a photo of my home," she wrote on Twitter. "I've gotten too many emails saying some version of, 'you are an ugly fat bitch who is clearly jealous of Taylor, plz die' … It sucks to be scared of every person milling about outside or feel like you can't answer the phone." Her overwhelmingly positive review nevertheless tarnished the numerical perfection conferred by Metacritic, hence the attack."

"Life went on - with limited disruption, if not quite as normal. After all, I have enough space, equipment and internet connectivity to work comfortably from home. In some ways, life has become more efficient. Less jet lag. More sanity."

"Employers argue they make considerable savings on real estate when workers shift from office to home work. However, these savings result from passing costs on to workers. Unless employees are fully compensated, this could become a variant of what urban theorist Andy Merrifield calls parasitic capitalism, whereby corporate profits increasingly rely on extracting value from the public - and now personal - realm, rather than on generating new value."

"Empirical evidence for this is beginning to appear. A recent large-scale study by the National Bureau for Economic Research in the US, using data from more than 3 million workers, found that the number of meetings per person had gone up 12.9% and the number of attendees per meeting increased by 13.5% during the pandemic. The researchers also found "significant and durable" increases in length of the average workday - up 8.2%, or 48.5 minutes - along with short-term increases in email activity."

"This is a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone, then screen "shared" on a mediated platform. "

"Admission algorithms can make or break your academic plans. A Washington Post investigation found 44 schools use prediction software to give applicants a score out of 100 for its admissions process. The score considers different aspects of a student's application from test scores, home address, transcripts, and even what websites they've visited. That's all calculated to rate how strong of a match a student is for a school."

"The Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) - which collaborated with ICA to roll out the scanning system - said in a statement that iris patterns have a higher degree of variation and uniqueness as compared to fingerprints, and are therefore "more robust and reliable.""

"Amazon customers have one week to opt out of a plan that would turn every Echo speaker and Ring security camera in the US into a shared wireless network, as part of the company's plan to fix connection problems for its smart home devices."

"The Home Office plans to use artificial intelligence to reduce the asylum backlog, and is launching a three-day hackathon in the search for quicker ways to process the 138,052 undecided asylum cases. The government is convening academics, tech experts, civil servants and business people to form 15 multidisciplinary teams tasked with brainstorming solutions to the backlog. Teams will be invited to compete to find the most innovative solutions, and will present their ideas to a panel of judges. The winners are expected to meet the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, in Downing Street for a prize-giving ceremony."

"Astonishingly, even as the UK government praises end-to-end encryption abroad, it is undermining it at home. The Online Safety Bill, which continues to proceed through parliament after being mentioned in the Queen's Speech, will target platforms that use end-to-end encryption by "placing a duty of care on service providers within the scope of the draft bill to moderate illegal and harmful content on their platforms, with fines and penalties for those that fail to uphold this duty". "

"This takes us to Kerala in south India, home to about 34 million people. There, the communist-led state government is launching something called the Kerala Fibre Optical Network (KFON) - and it's a major milestone. (It is worth noting the irony that the communist government, which has a history of opposing the introduction of computers, is now at the forefront of this digital initiative.) In 2016, the state recognised the internet as a basic citizen's right, joining other polities like Finland, Costa Rica and France. Next on the agenda: making this new right mean something. Despite facing various setbacks - such as the pandemic and a corruption allegation that led to the arrest of the senior bureaucrat who was previously in charge of KFON (he denies the allegation) - the project has finally been launched. It's a fibre-optic broadband network project, aiming to provide affordable and reliable internet connectivity to every household, government institution and business entity in the state."

"Parent "Portals," as utilized in K12 education, are doing significant harm to student development.[1] For those not familiar, Parent Portals are learning management systems that provide "real time" information to parents of school-aged children: "grades, attendance, assignments, and more." On a daily basis parents can monitor their child's performance in school and intervene at home. In theory, this seems like a good thing. But what is the difference between "real time" data and constant surveillance? In my view, not much. What if surveillance is not conducive to education? I'm working this one out. Let's see where it goes."

"What distinguishes Fog Reveal from other cellphone location technologies used by police is that it follows the devices through their advertising IDs, unique numbers assigned to each device. These numbers do not contain the name of the phone's user, but can be traced to homes and workplaces to help police establish pattern-of-life analyses."

"Racists on the notorious troll site 4chan are using a powerful new and free AI-powered image generator service offered by Microsoft to create antisemitic propaganda, according to posts reviewed by Bellingcat. Users of 4chan, which has frequently hosted hate speech and played home to posts by mass shooters, tasked Bing Image Creator to create photo-realistic antisemitic caricatures of Jews and, in recent days, shared images created by the platform depicting Orthodox men preparing to eat a baby, carrying migrants across the US border (the latter a nod to the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory), and committing the 9/11 attacks."