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"Amnesty argues facial recognition is incompatible with basic privacy rights"

"A Chinese bot network played a key role in spreading disinformation during and after the US election, including a debunked video of "ballot burning" shared by Eric Trump, a new study reveals. The misleading video shows a man filming himself on Virginia Beach, allegedly burning votes cast for Donald Trump. The ballots were actually samples. The clip went viral after Trump's son Eric posted it a day later on his official Twitter page, where it got more than 1.2m views."

"From another perspective, the idea that people seem comfortable offloading their troubles not on to a sympathetic human, but a sympathetic-sounding computer program, might present an opportunity. Even before the pandemic, there were not enough mental health professionals to meet demand. In the UK, there are 7.6 psychiatrists per 100,000 people; in some low-income countries, the average is 0.1 per 100,000."

"The UK's information commissioner just told a parliamentary subcommittee on online harms and disinformation that a secret arrangement between her office and Facebook prevents her from publicly answering whether or not Facebook contacted the ICO about completing a much-trumpeted 'app audit'."

"Employees worry that, should Signal fail to build policies and enforcement mechanisms to identify and remove bad actors, the fallout could bring more negative attention to encryption technologies from regulators at a time when their existence is threatened around the world. "The world needs products like Signal - but they also need Signal to be thoughtful," said Gregg Bernstein, a former user researcher who left the organization this month over his concerns. "It's not only that Signal doesn't have these policies in place. But they've been resistant to even considering what a policy might look like.""

"Three-Dimensional Computer Simulations Have Solved The Mystery Of Why Doomed Stars Explode"

"In these cases, we call the SDKs "trackers" or "tracker SDKs." We follow the lead of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, and other digital rights organizations and use the term broadly: "Trackers" encompasses traditional advertisement surveillance, behavioral, and location monitoring. Legitimate uses may include user feedback mechanisms, telemetry, and crash reporters. App developers have decided to include tracker SDKs in apps for a variety of reasons, and we do not categorize all usage of trackers as malicious or condemn the app authors. Additionally, given the complexity and pace of software development, some developers may not be aware that trackers are in their app or may not know the full implications of bundling such code before publishing."

""The fact is that an interconnected ecosystem of companies and data brokers, of purveyors of fake news and peddlers of division, of trackers and hucksters just looking to make a quick buck, is more present in our lives than it has ever been," he said. "Technology does not need vast troves of personal data, stitched together across dozens of websites and apps, in order to succeed.""

"It's hard to incentivise profit-driven companies to change their services according to specific needs while maintaining them free and accessible for all."

"As LGBTQ Egyptians flock to apps like Grindr, Hornet, and Growlr, they face an unprecedented threat from police and blackmailers who use the same apps to find targets."

"Given everything the Pacific, and the world, have sacrificed this pandemic, a forum reduced to a virtual meeting is far from the greatest loss. But it is already having consequences, with threats from some countries to abandon the forum altogether because of a lack of consensus over who, now, will lead it."

"Last month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted a patent to Microsoft that outlines a process to create a conversational chatbot of a specific person using their social data. In an eerie twist, the patent says the chatbot could potentially be inspired by friends or family members who are deceased, which is almost a direct plot of a popular episode of Netflix's Black Mirror."

"Researchers fed these algorithms (which function like autocomplete, but for images) pictures of a man cropped below his neck: 43% of the time the image was autocompleted with the man wearing a suit. When you fed the same algorithm a similarly cropped photo of a woman, it auto-completed her wearing a low-cut top or bikini a massive 53% of the time. For some reason, the researchers gave the algorithm a picture of the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and found that it also automatically generated an image of her in a bikini. (After ethical concerns were raised on Twitter, the researchers had the computer-generated image of AOC in a swimsuit removed from the research paper.)"

""The code reasonably attempts to address the bargaining power imbalance between digital platforms and Australian news businesses," he said. Google's search engine not as good as its competitors for news, research finds Read more "It also recognises the important role search plays, not only to consumers but to the thousands of Australian small businesses that rely on search and advertising technology to fund and support their organisations." The code, which is currently before the parliament, would facilitate negotiations between media companies and digital platforms - currently just Facebook and Google - for payment for content. If an agreement cannot be reached, then it goes to an arbiter for resolution."

"YANGON: Internet providers in Myanmar including state-owned telecom MPT were blocking access to Facebook-owned services in the country on Thursday (Feb 4), days after military leaders seized power in a coup."

"It means the specially engineered spinach has embedded within its leaf mesophyll single-walled carbon nanotubes capable of fluorescing with an intensity relative to the level of nitroaromatics taken up by the roots. And then it sends an email."

"Whereas most machine learning algorithms can't hone their skills beyond an initial training period, the researchers say the new approach, called a liquid neural network, has a kind of built-in "neuroplasticity." That is, as it goes about its work-say, in the future, maybe driving a car or directing a robot-it can learn from experience and adjust its connections on the fly."

"The internet and its progeny, like smart car dashboards and buzzing smartphones, are built to make it seem like they can help us multitask, but our brains just aren't cut out for it. "It leads us to try to engage in multiple information-demanding activities simultaneously, and that is what our brains just do not do very well. They weren't evolved for that very type of demand," said Gazzaley, who also wrote The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World."

"Bitcoin is stored on software known as a digital wallet that is secured through encryption. A password is used as a decryption key to open the wallet and access the bitcoin. When a password is lost the user cannot open the wallet. The fraudster had been sentenced to more than two years in jail for covertly installing software on other computers to harness their power to "mine" or produce bitcoin. When he went behind bars, his bitcoin stash would have been worth a fraction of the current value. The price of bitcoin has surged over the past year, hitting a record high of US$42,000 in January. It was trading at US$37,577 on Friday, according to cryptocurrency and blockchain website Coindesk."