""Anonymised" data lies at the core of everything from modern medical research to personalised recommendations and modern AI techniques. Unfortunately, according to a paper, successfully anonymising data is practically impossible for any complex dataset."
"However, once technology is released it's like herding cats. Deepfakes are a moving feast and as soon as moderators find a way of detecting them, people will find a workaround."
"When Fry returned to London, she realised how mathematicians, computer engineers and physicists are so used to working on abstract problems that they rarely stop to consider the ethics of how their work might be used"
"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."
"Robots engender human sympathy. Seen in the wild, they appear to have agency, feelings, and desires. R2D2's spunk, C3PO's intelligence, Wall-E's charm. When delivery bots get stuck on the sidewalk, good Samaritans help them get unstuck. In light of the attack on K5, then, you may be thinking: Poor guy."
"The Court found that the fundamental right to privacy is greater than the economic interest of the commercial firm and, in some circumstances, the public interest interest in access to Information. The European Court affirmed the judgment of the Spanish Data Protection Agency which upheld press freedoms and rejected a request to have the article concerning personal bankruptcy removed from the web site of the press organization."
"In Mexico, government-exclusive spyware technology is being used to target journalists, human rights defenders, anti-corruption advocates, and international investigators. Luis Fernando Garcia, Director of R3D, explains how technology meant to track terrorists is being turned against activists"
"Encryption is the digital lock which gives us the security to trust our financial data and inner-most thoughts to the cloud, and without which everything, and I mean everything, in our digital lives might be exposed. "
"My latest Locus Magazine column is DRM Broke Its Promise, which recalls the days when digital rights management was pitched to us as a way to enable exciting new markets where we'd all save big by only buying the rights we needed (like the low-cost right to read a book for an hour-long plane ride), but instead (unsurprisingly) everything got more expensive and less capable. "
"It is in the nature of AI that makers do not, and often cannot, predict what their creations do. We know how to make machines learn. But programmers do not understand completely the knowledge that intelligent computing acquires. If we did, we wouldn't need computers to learn to learn."
"A group of current and former contractors who worked for years at the social network's Berlin-based moderation centres has reported witnessing colleagues become "addicted" to graphic content and hoarding ever more extreme examples for a personal collection. They also said others were pushed towards the far right by the amount of hate speech and fake news they read every day."
"This led to claims that the software is woefully inaccurate; in fact, police had set the threshold for a match at 60%, meaning that faces do not have to be rated as that similar to be flagged up. This minimises the chance of a person of interest slipping through the net, but also makes a lot of false positives inevitable."
"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."
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