Group items tagged

"n the never-ending calls for Twitter to better police its platform, the words of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer from 170 years ago remain relevant: "Every article, even in a newspaper, should be accompanied by the name of its author… so that when a man publicly proclaims through the far-sounding trumpet of the newspaper, he should be answerable for it, at any rate with his honour, if he has any; and if he has none, let his name neutralise the effect of his words… the result of such a measure would be to put an end to two-thirds of the newspaper lies, and to restrain the audacity of many a poisonous tongue.""

"The software, 4 Little Trees, was created by Hong Kong-based startup Find Solution AI. While the use of emotion recognition AI in schools and other settings has caused concern, founder Viola Lam says it can make the virtual classroom as good as - or better than - the real thing. Students work on tests and homework on the platform as part of the school curriculum. While they study, the AI measures muscle points on their faces via the camera on their computer or tablet, and identifies emotions including happiness, sadness, anger, surprise and fear. "

"SINGAPORE: Personal information of about 129,000 Singtel customers was stolen after a recent data breach of a third-party file sharing system, the local telco said on Wednesday (Feb 17). Singtel has completed initial investigations into the breach and established which files on the Accellion file transfer appliance (FTA) were accessed illegally, the company said in a news release."

"So, are you on Clubhouse, the social-media sensation du jour? No? Me neither. But - I hasten to add, lest there should be any doubt about my social status - that's not because I wasn't invited to join. A generous friend had a few invitations to extend, and she offered me one. After that, she had an attack of what one can only describe as donor's remorse, because in order to be able to extend the invitation to me she had to grant Clubhouse access to all her contacts!"

"POLICE IN CHINA'S Liaoning province were sitting on mounds of data collected through invasive means: financial records, travel information, vehicle registrations, social media, and surveillance camera footage. To make sense of it all, they needed sophisticated analytic software. Enter American business computing giant Oracle, whose products could find relevant data in the police department's disparate feeds and merge it with information from ongoing investigations."

"The verdict against Haneen Hossam, Mowada al-Adham and three others came after they had posted footage on the video-sharing app TikTok. The ruling, which can be appealed, included a fine of 300,000 Egyptian pounds (£14,600) for each defendant."

"In the beginning, we thought anonymity was part of the problem - that people being able to hide behind their screens without being identified were willing to say more extreme things than people who are named. But now you see people don't care about being named. They're willing to go to a public white supremacist rally unmasked with their full identity showing. They're proud of it. It doesn't make me believe more in humanity."

"Company emails that she provided to NPR show her employer believed the tracking software would improve the team's productivity and efficiency while everyone was working from home."

"The app, called Care19, and produced by a company called ProudCrowd that also makes a location-based social networking app for North Dakota State sports fans, generates a random ID number for each person who uses it. Then, it can "anonymously cache the individual's locations throughout the day," storing information about where people spent at least 10 minutes at a time, according to the state website. If users test positive for the coronavirus, they can provide that information to the North Dakota Department of Health for contact-tracing purposes so that other people who spent time near virus patients can potentially be notified."

"After spending hours studying FAQ pages, sending terse emails and making occasional phone calls in an earnest-if-naive attempt to take back some control of my personal information online, I had my first demoralizing moment."

""The AI will be trained to detect incidents such as people fighting, a group of agitated persons, people following someone else, and arguments or other abnormal behaviour," SMART lecturer and team lead Johan Barthelemy said. "It can also identify an unsafe environment, such as where there is a lack of lighting.The system will then alert a human operator who can quickly react if there is an issue.""

"Decentralized storage platforms break apart the users' files and distribute them across multiple nodes on their network. Since the data is scattered across multiple nodes, there is no single point of failure."

"Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges"

"The tool tracks every click and interaction by employees and presents managers with leaderboards showing relative "productivity" of each employee, down to how many mentions they get in workplace emails."

"In a collaboration between CyberNews Sr. Information Security Researcher Mantas Sasnauskas and researchers James Clee and Roni Carta, suspicious backdoors have been discovered in a Chinese-made Jetstream router, sold exclusively at Walmart as their new line of "affordable" wifi routers. This backdoor would allow an attacker the ability to remotely control not only the routers, but also any devices connected to that network. "

"We live in a performative age. We're rewarded for revealing our private lives to strangers, for exaggerating our emotions online, for sharing every crisis that happens in our bodies, every thought that passes through our heads. So many of us now depend on the reactions of strangers for our own identity."

"One of the problems with The Social Dilemma is that it supposes that tech did what it claims it did - that these are actually such incredible geniuses that they figured out how to use machine learning to control minds. And that's the problem - the mind control thing they designed to sell you fidget spinners got hijacked to make your uncle racist. But there's another possibility, which is that their claims are rubbish. They just overpromised in their sales material, and that what actually happened with that growth of monopolies and corruption in the public sphere made people cynical, angry, bitter and violent. In which case the problem isn't that their tools were misused. The problem is that the structures in which those tools were developed are intrinsically corrupt and corrupting."

"How to foster a reliable and diverse information space, protect human rights from intrusive surveillance, and promote internet freedom."

"Service providers, including many ORG members, will be required to do this through the imposition of a "duty of care" - a concept awkwardly borrowed from health & safety - which will require them to monitor the integrity of their services not by objective technical standards, but by subjective "codes of practice" on both illegal and legal content. Although the framework has been drawn up with large American social media platforms in mind, it would apply to any site or service with UK users which hosts user-generated content. A blog with comments will be fair game. An app with user reviews will be fair game. "