"Fear-mongering Citizen app apparently stepped up from crime pronouncement to vigilantism this weekend when they offered a $30k reward for information about a gentleman they believed to be an arsonist responsible for starting a large fire.
It is pretty clear local law enforcement didn't ask for this assistance and that sharing of the photo could easily have endangered the "suspect," or in this case victim, especially as requested in the quote below."
"But that was not before the falsely accused man had his name and image widely shared. The alert sent by Citizen contained a photo and was seen by more than 861,000 people. It read: "Citizen is offering a $30,000 reward to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest of the arson suspect."
Citizen told the Guardian in a statement it offered the cash reward "without formal coordination with the appropriate agencies".
"Once we realized this error, we immediately retracted the photo and reward offer," it said. "We are actively working to improve our internal processes to ensure this does not occur again. This was a mistake we are taking very seriously.""
"Iqbal Khan works as a chauffeur in Lahore. His children are in his home village in a rural area north of Peshawar. Both of these very different areas of Pakistan have the same problem for many of their young people: no means of getting access to an education.
Online learning was not an option for Khan's children as the pandemic locked down schools across cities and countryside. Even as he worked to pay the school fees, his two sons, aged 16 and 13, were unable to access any lessons as their schools went digital."
"It can be a tricky balance, especially as machines become more sophisticated.
"Usually artificial intelligence systems are capable of coping better than humans because, as an example, they don't suffer from annoyance. They are infinitely patient, they don't care about wasting time," says Mauro Migliardi, associate professor at the University of Padua in Italy. He recently coauthored a paper summarizing 20 years of captcha versions and their effectiveness."
"So here's where we are: an online system has been running wild for years, generating billions in profits for its participants. We have evidence of its illegitimacy and a powerful law on the statute book that in principle could bring it under control, but which we appear unable to enforce. And the only body that has, to date, been able to exert real control over the aforementioned racket is… a giant private company that itself is subject to serious concerns about its monopolistic behaviour. And the question for today: where is democracy in all this? You only have to ask to know the answer."
"With this BCI, our study participant, whose hand was paralysed from spinal cord injury, achieved typing speeds of 90 characters per minute with 94.1% raw accuracy online, and greater than 99% accuracy offline with a general-purpose autocorrect."
"In the midst of a global pandemic and an unprecedented misinformation glut, Google has decided to hide some Australian news sites from its search results. It is "experimenting" with the lone supply of fact-checked, accountable information Australians can access right now."
"More than 400,000 crime records could have been affected by a data blunder, with records for serious offences supposed to be kept forever accidentally deleted and police fearing criminals may not be caught, a letter from a senior officer reveals.
The records were accidentally deleted due to a coding error on 10 January, and the incident affects fingerprints, DNA, and arrest records on the police national computer (PNC)."
"Italian prosecutors have opened an investigation into the accidental death of a 10-year-old girl who allegedly took part in a "blackout challenge" on the video-sharing network TikTok.
The probe came as Italy announced it had temporarily blocked access to TikTok for users whose age could not be proved definitively.
According to TikTok's terms and conditions, users must be at least 13 years old."
"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."
""It's really easy to lose track on social media," Bowman said. "And most people are not on Twitter, but this stuff percolates on to Facebook, WhatsApp chats, everywhere."
The ambition, Ritchie says, is not "for Toby Young to tweet, actually I was wrong. They're in an ideological system where they're not interested in a real debate. It's for the person who hears someone say something bizarre, and thinks, I don't know how to reply to that.""
"Haptic devices aimed at addressing genuine medical need, or for entertainment and novelty, seem appropriate and even fun. However, we believe it's important to stay vigilant - any technology that changes the norms of our social interactions could have unintended consequences."
"Personal information of more than 243 million Brazilians was exposed for more than six months thanks to weakly encoded credentials stored in the source code of the Brazilian Ministry of Health's website. The data leak exposed both living and deceased Brazilians' medical records to possible unauthorized access. The incident was the second reported by Brazilian publication Estadão and among several others recently affecting South America's largest nation's healthcare system."
"A natural alternative to symbolic AI came to prominence: Instead of modeling high-level reasoning processes, why not instead model the brain? After all, brains are the only things that we know for certain can produce intelligent behavior. Why not start with them?"
"What if this isn't just a one-off case of a popular professor dying. With so many classes online, why wouldn't universities just lay off any professor with a body of recorded lectures? We already know that tenure is harder to achieve every year, and schools are relying more and more on adjunct professors who teach a couple of classes on yearly contracts with no benefits. This scheme could save schools even more money! Of course, tuition will remain the same. One prof in the Twitter thread saw this possibility already."
"Google and Facebook are both fighting against legislation currently before the parliament that would force them to enter into negotiations with news media companies for payment for content, with an arbiter to ultimately decide the payment amount if no agreement can be reached.
On Friday, the pair escalated the dispute by threatening to remove the Google search engine from Australia and Facebook to remove news from the Facebook feeds of all Australian users."
"But today that universe seeks and surrounds you. When you first join Facebook you make a few choices of your own. But soon the algorithm starts narrowing your options and deciding what further choices to present to you. Because many of us rely on a limited number of news sources that populate our social media feeds, our information universe becomes more and more niche. For Trump supporters, that universe is often paramilitary."
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