Group items tagged

"First, lucrative state contracts are given to private corporations to build and deploy policing technologies that surveil and manage target groups. Then, using the vast amounts of biometric and social media data extracted from those groups, the private companies improve their technologies and sell retail versions of them to other states and institutions, such as schools. Finally, all this turns the target groups into a ready source of cheap labor - either through direct coercion or indirectly through stigma."

""How are we going to trust anything electronically mediated in the very near future? What do we do when anyone can imitate anyone else, for any reason that suits them?""

"This might be a bit disappointing for you. But if you think about it, what would be a satisfying answer to the meaning of life, in the simulation or out of it? It seems difficult to think of a fully satisfying answer to a question that has been put on the most ornate pedestal of all questions. 'To love or to live' sound like something you'd read in a cheap self-help book. The Epicureans thought that the meaning of life was to seek modest pleasures. To me at least, that does not sound very satisfying."

"This is the dark, flamboyant humour beloved of the "stan" culture of pop superfans, and in this case, quite funny. But another attack on Jillian Mapes, Pitchfork's reviewer, was very serious: "Contact info both old and current was leaked, down to a photo of my home," she wrote on Twitter. "I've gotten too many emails saying some version of, 'you are an ugly fat bitch who is clearly jealous of Taylor, plz die' … It sucks to be scared of every person milling about outside or feel like you can't answer the phone." Her overwhelmingly positive review nevertheless tarnished the numerical perfection conferred by Metacritic, hence the attack."

"Algorithms and the data that drive them are designed and created by people, which means those systems can carry biases based on who builds them and how they're ultimately deployed. Safiya Umoja Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, offers a curated reading list exploring how technology can replicate and reinforce racist and sexist beliefs, how that bias can affect everything from health outcomes to financial credit to criminal justice, and why data discrimination is a major 21st century challenge."

"An online self-help programme that helps people sleep better is more effective than face-to-face psychological therapy, a study involving over 7,000 NHS patients has found. Sleepio, a six-week digital treatment for insomnia, helped 56% of users beat the condition, whereas the success rate in NHS Improving access to psychological therapy (Iapt) services is 50%."

"A record 54m tonnes of "e-waste" was generated worldwide in 2019, up 21% in five years, the UN's Global E-waste Monitor report found. The 2019 figure is equivalent to 7.3kg for every man, woman and child on Earth, though use is concentrated in richer nations. The amount of e-waste is rising three times faster than the world's population, and only 17% of it was recycled in 2019."

"Former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden says that tech workers need to think long and hard about how their labor is used by companies to amass power, surveil people, and fundamentally change society, and need to think about whether it is ethical to work at tech companies at all."

"KUALA LUMPUR: Facial recognition technology today is increasingly being used by law enforcement agencies, banks, hotels, airport and now convenience stores to detect and arrest criminals quickly. Kuala Lumpur Police chief Datuk Seri Mazlan Lazim said by the installation of facial recognition closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in convenience stores the faces of criminals can be clearly recorded to trace their identities."

""There's sort of an emerging sense behind the scenes of executives saying, 'This is not going to be sustainable,'" said Laszlo Bock, chief executive of human-resources startup Humu and the former HR chief at Google. No CEO should be surprised that the early productivity gains companies witnessed as remote work took hold have peaked and leveled off, he adds, because workers left offices in March armed with laptops and a sense of doom."

"Recent studies concluded that the smoothness of a tablet screen leads to an alteration of handwriting features, whereby the impact on graphomotor execution varies according to the level of the writer's handwriting skills"

"Criminals often hide illicit data on the XBox in the hope that a gaming console will not be seen as a likely evidence target especially when conventional personal computers are present in the same premises, for instance"

Planned to be used in medical care.

"The Singapore government is to establish a new Data Security Office and implement a number of measures to better safeguard citizen information, following a series of serious government data leaks.  "

"I gave a talk on "What TinyML Needs from Hardware", and afterwards one of the attendees emailed to ask where some of my numbers came from. In particular, he was intrigued by my note on slide 6 that "Expectations are for tens or hundreds of billions of devices over the next few years""

"TOKYO/GUANGZHOU -- From shopping to banking to boarding airplanes, an economy based on facial recognition is taking root in Japan, enabling consumers to live a cashless, bag-free life. "

"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.""