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"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"

"But now Silicon Valley seems to be under a little-noticed threat. Amid Covid-19, the deep recession, and renewed antitrust pressure from Congress and regulators, the Valley faces a very different challenge - the disruption of its very essence, the serendipitous encounter. The culprit is a rush by many of the Valley's leading companies to permanently lock in the coronavirus-led shift to remote work."

"Before we go deeper, it's important to note that there are two approaches to facial - or any biometric - authentication: "match on server" and "match on device." The former approach shares some of the risky aspects of facial recognition technology because it stores the details of one's most personal features-your face or your fingerprint-on a server, which is inherently insecure. There are some well-publicized examples of biometric databases being hacked, which is why so many companies are committing to only do on-device biometrics."

"There has been a great amount of research and resources dedicated to mapping social media "pipelines" into far-right and reactionary politics. Less thought, however, has been dedicated to a leftwing alternative. This is a huge gap in how the left, broadly, thinks about online politics. While the problems of online rightwing radicalization are very real, I believe that the mechanisms of social media also offer a path for progressive and leftwing politicization."

"Goodreads stagnates even as its near-monopoly persists, a wedding of the worst excesses of online commenting, fiction fandom and tech-biz social engineering. The lies, the insecure hatereaders, the impassive tolerance of toxic behavior-all are brought to bear, without mercy, on authors at the precarious margins of career security. And after all that, it's all but useless as a discovery service. At The New Stateman, Sarah Manavis hopes that its "reign of terror" will soon come to an end."

"Information collected includes dates of birth, addresses, marital status, along with photographs, political associations, relatives and social media IDs. It collates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and even TikTok accounts, as well as news stories, criminal records and corporate misdemeanours. While much of the information has been "scraped" from open-source material, some profiles have information which appears to have been sourced from confidential bank records, job applications and psychological profiles."

"The submission outlines Big Blue's belief that facial recognition is fine in a "1 to 1" context such as unlocking a phone. But IBM is opposed to "1 to many" facial recognition that refers to a database to identify a face in a crowd and could therefore be used for "mass surveillance systems, racial profiling or other human rights violations.""

"Chinese consumers are increasingly standing up to Internet giants for their digital privacy in an unprecedented way. China is in the early stages of setting up a data protection regulatory system. The Cyber Security Law, effective Jun 1, 2017, included for the first time a set of data protection provisions in the form of national-level legislation. The 2018 e-Commerce Law incorporated data privacy protections for consumers such as the "right to be forgotten", similar to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation."

"Iam not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a "feeling brain". "

"To Lawmakers and School Administrators: As parents and caregivers, there is nothing more important to us than our children's safety. That's why we're calling for an outright ban on the use of facial recognition in schools. We're concerned about this technology spreading to our schools, infringing on our kids' rights and putting them in danger. We don't even know the psychological impacts this constant surveillance can have on our children, but we do know that violating their basic rights will create an environment of mistrust and will make it hard for students to succeed and grow. The images collected by this technology will become a target for those wishing to harm our children, and could put them in physical danger or at risk of having their biometric information stolen or sold. The well-known bias built into this technology will put Black and brown children, girls, and gender noncomforming kids in specific danger. Facial recognition creates more harm than good and should not be used on the children we have been entrusted to protect. It should instead be immediately banned."

"From a practical standpoint, that means government agencies, like the Portland Bureau of Police, cannot use facial recognition software for videos from body cameras, dash cams, or any other form of surveillance equipment."

"The architecture of the social internet itself tells us not to be patient - to load more tweets, to hit refresh for new posts, and to click the top search results."

"Much of the excitement around 3D printing in space has focused on using it to construct buildings from lunar rock"

"Virtual reality company, AVRT, has been collaborating with the force to create realistic computer generated scenarios officers might be in, such as dealing with a person in an alleyway or a rooftop"

"Remote working changes not just our understanding of a working community and the company ethos, but also our very concept of physical reality. Suddenly, to misappropriate Gertrude Stein, there is no there there. But if there is no shared space, what's to stop employers following the example of many customer-care call centres, and employ much cheaper staff based in the developing world?"

"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."

"But users began to spot flaws in the feature over the weekend. The first to highlight the issue was PhD student Colin Madland, who discovered the issue while highlighting a different racial bias in the video-conference software Zoom. When Madland, who is white, posted an image of himself and a black colleague who had been erased from a Zoom call after its algorithm failed to recognise his face, Twitter automatically cropped the image to only show Madland."

""The concern is, are the Chinese extra-territorialising their surveillance state? You could make a case that they are when other countries are using technologies like Hikvision that they use on their own citizens. They can now do globally," said James Lewis, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. Hikvision has rebutted those concerns and said there is no evidence that surveillance collected in other countries using its cameras has ever been sent to Beijing."