Group items tagged

"According to a report by Sophos, malware and spam are on the rise on social networks such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. In the last year, 57% of users report they have been spammed via social networking sites, an increase of 70.6% compared to last year. Furthermore, 36% of users claim they've been sent malware via social networking sites, which is a rise of 69.8% from last year. On the other hand, CEOs of companies are concerned that their employees' usage of social networks is posing a security risk for their company. Sophos has surveyed more than 500 organizations, discovering that 72% of them think social networks are a danger for their companys, with 60% of them tagging Facebook as the biggest security risk, followed by MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, says that Facebook is the biggest threat because it's the biggest social network out there, but he also places some of the blame on Facebook's own privacy rules. "When Facebook rolled-out its new recommended privacy settings late last year, it was a backwards step, encouraging many users to share their information with everybody on the internet," he says. Interestingly enough (and contrasted to some of the reports we've seen lately), Cluley thinks that simply barring access to Facebook is not the solution. "Social networks can be an essential part of the business mix today," he says, "and the answer is not to bar staff from participating in them but to apply some 'social security' instead.""

"The slightly misleading name for this resource is "personal data." Whether handed over intentionally or unwittingly, it captured by social media, cookies, and the internet of things captures, second-by-second now, granular details of behavior, temperament, and even thinking. It is an enormously valuable asset because it can be used to draw inferences not just about the expected future behavior of the producing subject."

"They join attempts by lawmakers to regulate the internet for kids. States have proposed and even passed laws that restrict what children can access online, up to banning certain services entirely. On the federal level, several recently introduced bipartisan bills run the gamut from giving children more privacy protections to forbidding them from using social media at all. Some efforts also try to control the content that children can be exposed to. Critics of such legislation point to privacy issues with age verification mechanisms and fears that forced content moderation will inevitably lead to censorship, preventing kids from seeing material that's helpful along with what's considered harmful."

"Some are outraged at what they consider theft of their artistic trademark. Greg Rutkowski, a concept artist and illustrator well known for his golden-light infused epic fantasy scenes, has already been mentioned in hundreds of thousands of prompts used across Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. "It's been just a month. What about in a year? I probably won't be able to find my work out there because [the internet] will be flooded with AI art," Rutkowski told MIT Technology Review. "That's concerning.""

"One of the beautiful things about the internet is the sheer amount of knowledge it contains: if you're interested in any topic, you can find a surfeit of information about it in an instant. But this can also have a downside. Search engines can end perpetuating bias, for example. And research by Adrian Ward from the University of Texas, Austin suggests that we can mistake information we've searched for as our own knowledge. Now, in a new paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Ward and colleagues have found that sharing information online also makes us feel that our knowledge has increased - even if we haven't read it."

"This is partially why online anonymity is so important - it gives people the grace of exploration and inquiry. It allows people to make choices, change their minds, learn, and grow. TikTok doesn't make room for this kind of internet exploration; it makes it impossible to have curiosity without consequence. TikTok isn't alone in using engagement and recommender algorithms to curate personalised content feeds, but it does take it to the extreme. This is profitable both because it keeps people scrolling and because there's very little difference between being able to personalise content and personalise ads."

"The legal but harmful provisions have become a lightning rod for concerns that the bill will result in an overly censorious approach on social media platforms. Tory MPs including David Davis have argued that the legal but harmful provisions in the bill mean tech firms will "inevitably err on the side of censorship" in how they police their platforms, while Truss has said she wants to "make sure free speech is allowed" when the bill comes back."

"Now, as more people use AI to produce and publish content, an obvious question arises: What happens as AI-generated content proliferates around the internet, and AI models begin to train on it, instead of on primarily human-generated content? A group of researchers from the UK and Canada have looked into this very problem and recently published a paper on their work in the open access journal arXiv. What they found is worrisome for current generative AI technology and its future: "We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models.""

"His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will "not be able to know what is true anymore." He is also worried that AI technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots such as ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. "It takes away the drudge work," he said. "It might take away more than that." Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow AI systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually to run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons - those killer robots - become reality."

"Parents tell Guardian Australia that "playing" on Omegle is something kids do at parties, at sleepovers. It just takes one of the group to have a screen with internet access and before long they are chatting to strangers all over the world."

"Curtin University internet studies professor Tama Leaver posted about some of his tests with Emu's sticker generation to X, formerly known as Twitter. Leaver found, for example, that the AI will block a phrase like "child with gun" and display a warning message about how the prompt doesn't follow Meta's Community Guidelines. Emu will, however, generate stickers with the similar, more niche prompt "child with grenade." It not only creates stickers of kids holding the weapon but also produces stickers of children holding guns."

"The lawsuit accused Anthropic of infringing the publishers' copyrights by copying their lyrics without permission as part of the "massive amounts of text" that it scrapes from the internet to train Claude to respond to human prompts. The publishers also say that Claude illegally reproduces the lyrics by request, and in response to "a whole range of prompts that do not seek Publishers' lyrics", including "requests to write a song about a certain topic, provide chord progressions for a given musical composition, or write poetry or short fiction in the style of a certain artist or songwriter"."

"Their research, published in Science, found that misinformation is '70 percent more likely to be retweeted on Twitter than the truth,' and that the fake news 'reached 1,500 people about six times faster than the truth.'" About 126,000 rumors were spread by ∼3 million people. False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1,000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth. The degree of novelty and the emotional reactions of recipients may be responsible for the differences observed. (via Science)"

"To conclude: this is all a long-winded way of saying the metaverse is the internet. But spatial. And built with game engines. And probably NFTs. And who knows where that takes us…"

"But in internet time 2009 was aeons ago. Now, intensive surveillance is available to anyone. And you don't have to be a tech wizard to do it. In mid-January this year, Kashmir Hill, a talented American tech reporter, used three bits of everyday consumer electronics - Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker - to track her husband's every move. He agreed to this in principle, but didn't realise just how many devices she had planted on him. He found only two of the trackers: a Tile he felt in the breast pocket of his coat and an AirTag in his backpack when he was looking for something else. "It is impossible to find a device that makes no noise and gives no warning," he said when she showed him the ones he missed."

"He struggled to reconcile his online renown with his life in Molins de Rei, a municipality of 26,000 people near Barcelona. Online he was super-famous, - a quick search of the phrase 'worst person you know' pulls up almost two billion results - but the fact that it was in English meant that few in his hometown or in the marketing agency where he works knew anything about it."

"Google adverts direct pregnant women to services run by UK anti-abortion groups The tech giant is carrying adverts styled to look like real internet search results for women seeking pregnancy advice Shanti Das Sat 25 Feb 2023 13.00 GMT Last modified on Sat 25 Feb 2023 20.15 GMT Women seeking online advice about abortions are being directed to pregnancy counselling services run by anti-abortion campaigners, an Observer investigation has found. Google adverts that are styled to look like real search results and appear above genuine listings are routinely being shown to people searching key terms relating to pregnancy and abortion."

""If these systems aren't used to create propaganda and misinformation yet, I don't know what certain governments are doing with their time," ex-Google engineer Blake Lemoine said. "We're letting the engineering get ahead of the science. We're building a thing that we literally don't understand.""

"Caroline, the 28-year-old behind a popular TikTok account where she posts satirical skits, found herself dropping the comedic tone when the child of a family vlogger sent her a letter and asked Caroline to share it with her 2.3 million followers. "To any parents that are considering starting a family vlog or monetizing your children's lives on the public internet, here is my advice: you shouldn't do it," the letter read. "Any money you get will be greatly overshadowed by years of suffering… your child will never be normal… I never consented to being online.""

"A fake, AI-generated image of Pope Francis stepping out in a stylish white puffer jacket and bejewelled crucifix racked up millions of views over the weekend - with many mistaking it for a real image. Experts fear the rapidly developing technology behind the image could soon undermine our ability to distinguish fake photos, which can be generated in seconds, from reality."