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"These exploits are based on chip engineering flaws, not on software flaws. Apple, Google, Abode, Microsoft, and other software companies didn't write poor software or bad Operating Systems to cause these problems to occur. Rather, the chip manufacturers - Intel, AMD and ARM - designed and then engineered computer chips with flaws built into them. Once discovered, those flaws allow the Meltdown and Spectre exploits to be run. Worse, these chips have been sold with consumer computers, servers and mobile devices since 1995. so the impact is, potentially, both personal and global in scope."

"This description is reminiscent of the controversy that erupted back in January 2018 when photojournalist A. M. Ahad shared a behind-the-scenes video of multiple photographers shooting photos of a young man who was leaning out of a train window and striking a prayerful pose." Seems you do not even need Photoshop - would policies have stopped this?

"It's been a year since the music links on Myspace stopped working; at first the company insisted that they were working on it, but now they've admitted that all those files are lost: "As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest that you retain your back up copies."

"Now they might finally get this thanks to a new $10 million contract the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched to design and build a secure voting system that it hopes will be impervious to hacking."

"Now a study published in Royal Society Open Science has failed to find any association between the time spent playing violent video games and aggressive behaviour, adding to a growing body of literature that suggests that such a link has been overstated - or may not exist at all."

"Interestingly, the time reversal algorithm itself could prove useful for making quantum computers more precise. "Our algorithm could be updated and used to test programs written for quantum computers and eliminate noise and errors," Lebedev explained."

""We have only examined a tiny fraction of this code base and found a critical, election-stealing issue," said Lewis, who is currently executive director of the Open Privacy Research Society, a Canadian nonprofit that develops secure and privacy-enhancing software for marginalized communities. "Even if this [backdoor] is closed its mere existence raises serious questions about the integrity of the rest of the code.""

"he outlines three sources of dysfunction - 'deliberate, malicious intent, such as state-sponsored hacking and attacks, criminal behaviour, and online harassment'; 'system design' which has created 'perverse incentives where user value is sacrificed, such as ad-based revenue models that commercially reward clickbait'; and the 'viral spread of misinformation'. he also calls attention to the 'unintended negative consequences' of the web, which he said had led to 'the outraged and polarised tone and quality of online discourse'."

"Back in 2016, the Dr Seuss estate won a preliminary court action against "Oh, The Places You'll Boldly Go!" a crowdfunded parody of Dr Seuss's "Oh the Places You'll Go!" and Star Trek, written by veteran Star Trek creator David "Tribble" Gerrold and illustrated by the comics giant Ty Templeton."

"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"

" filters are so expensive that only US Big Tech companies could afford them, and they are incapable of distinguishing fair dealing (including things like the music playing in the background of the video of your child's first steps) from infringement, and they are incredibly error prone, to say nothing of the problems of allowing anyone in the world to identify creative works as their copyright with no means to weed out false and fraudulent claims."

" discovered an insecure Chinese database of 1.8 million women, aged 15-39"

"Universal has deployed the creepily named Validfill RFID system"

"There are some things that you can do to protect yourself from falling for a hoax. As the author of the upcoming book "Fake Photos," to be published in August, I'd like to offer a few tips to protect yourself from falling for a hoax."

"Automatically produced texts use language models derived from statistical analysis of vast corpuses of human-generated text to produce machine-generated texts that can be very hard for a human to distinguish from text produced by another human. These models could help malicious actors in many ways, including generating convincing spam, reviews, and comments -- so it's really important to develop tools that can help us distinguish between human-generated and machine-generated texts."

"The underlying theory is that art evolves "through small alterations to a known style that produce a new one," which, as Ian Bogost (previously) points out, is "a convenient take, given that any machine-learning technique has to base its work on a specific training set.""

"The single biggest known British political advertiser on Facebook is a mysterious pro-Brexit campaign group pushing for a no-deal exit from the EU. The revelation about Britain's Future, which has never disclosed the source of its funding or organisational structure, has raised concerns about the influence of "dark money" in British politics."