Group items tagged

"EFF has released its mobile app to help people join in important, timely struggles, but you can't get it for your Iphone or Ipad, because Apple insists that EFF use DRM, and this is contrary to everything it stands for. In a petition, EFF calls out Apple's incredibly abusive, one-sided developer "agreement" and calls on developers and Apple users to join a campaign to get Apple to give developers the freedom to release their creations on more liberal terms."

"Twitter claims a 90 percent accuracy rate for the clever techniques it uses to learn the gender of any given user. Glenn Fleishman reports on a the company's disconcerting new analytics tools, the research behind them, and how large a pinch of salt they come with."

"Halifax's system, which is currently at the proof-of-concept stage, uses a piece of wearable technology known as the Nymi band; it monitors and stores a user's heartbeat via an electrocardiogram (ECG). Users must wear the Nymi on one wrist, and touch its top sensor with the opposite hand for it to work. The Nymi pairs with a smartphone via Bluetooth, using a companion app for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. Removal of the wristband invalidates biometric authentication."

"But the bigger problem with things like public tweets is that no-one knows what information can be derived from them, either now or in the future. I write as a data analyst who's done a fair bit of work with this kind of material. What follows are a few techniques that aren't at all obvious to the average Twitter user. They go far beyond reading the surface text (or metadata) of an individual tweet. And these are just some of the techniques currently used to mine this data, ethically or unethically, legally or illegally."

"Marlinspike's Textsecure has an impeccable reputation as a secure platform, and Whatsapp founder Jan Koum attributes his desire to add security to his users' conversations to his experiences with the surveillance state while growing up in Soviet Ukraine. However, without any independent security audit or (even better) source-code publication, we have to take the company's word that it has done the right thing and that it's done it correctly."

"This is what's about to happen with twitpic, for years the go-to service for posting photos to Twitter, and the people in charge appear to be doing what they can to prevent the Internet Archive preserving the database and to deny users functional archive access to their own uploads. "

"With all the information together, they created a prediction model which can guess with 80% accuracy whether or not that user will go on to be banned from just their first five posts. "

""Nothing in this bill ensures the security of that data, either. Instead it turns every business providing telecommunications in or to the United Kingdom into an attack vector. The best way to guarantee the safety of user data is for it to not exist. Our national security will be significantly enhanced if we store less data, not more, and increase the use of strong cryptography, rather than reducing it.""

"Wired recently started an anti-ad-blocking campaign that attempts to prevent ad-blocked users from reading articles unless they pay a monthly subscription fee. On the heels of this decision comes a roundup of the major ad-blockers, some of which are pretty dodgy indeed. Adblock Plus comes off the worst of the lot. The company charges publishers fees to allow their ads through its filters, based on criteria about size and placement. Ghostery blocks trackers, but by default gathers "anonymized" data about your browsing habits (it's very hard to conclusively describe any deep data set as anonymized). "

"TeslaCrypt ransomware with new features that are impossible to crack, according to Cisco's Talos security arm. That means user infected with the latest version (3.01) of the malware can no longer use white hat-engineered software to get their files back. Until someone finds a new solution -- and that seems unlikely -- victims will have to pay."

"Many people unwittingly sign up to be location-tracked 24/7, unaware that the highly sensitive data this generates is being used and sold on for profit. Campaigners say that if this information were stolen by hackers, criminals could use it to target children as they leave school or homes after occupants have gone out."

"is an experimental service from Carnegie Mellon University that stores images of old processors, as well as the old operating systems that ran on top of them, along with software packages for those old OSes; this allows users to access old data from obsolete systems inside simulations of the computers that originally ran that data, using the original operating systems and applications."

"Until around an hour and a half after the award was announced on Tuesday, the Canadian physicist Donna Strickland was not deemed significant enough to merit her own page on the user-edited encyclopedia. The oversight has once again highlighted the marginalization of women in science and gender bias at Wikipedia."

"According to tests performed by Wang Yue at Zhihu, the Huawei P30 Pro isn't just enhancing the image information the user captures but actually placing pre-existing imagery of the moon into the photo."

"There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called "continuous partial attention", severely limiting people's ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity - even when the device is turned off. "Everyone is distracted," Rosenstein says. "All of the time.""

"His team trained a machine learning algorithm to spot words and phrases associated with bullying on social media site AskFM, which allows users to ask and answer questions. It managed to detect and block almost two-thirds of insults within almost 114,000 posts in English and was more accurate than a simple keyword search. Still, it did struggle with sarcastic remarks."

"Under the proposal, online platforms would have to spend hundreds of millions of euros on algorithmic copyright filters that would compare everything users tried to post with a database of supposedly copyrighted works, which anyone could add anything to, and block any suspected matches. This would snuff out all the small EU competitors to America's Big Tech giants, and put all Europeans' communications under threat of arbitrary censorship by balky, unaccountable, easily abused algorithms."

"he outlines three sources of dysfunction - 'deliberate, malicious intent, such as state-sponsored hacking and attacks, criminal behaviour, and online harassment'; 'system design' which has created 'perverse incentives where user value is sacrificed, such as ad-based revenue models that commercially reward clickbait'; and the 'viral spread of misinformation'. he also calls attention to the 'unintended negative consequences' of the web, which he said had led to 'the outraged and polarised tone and quality of online discourse'."

"Vietnam has introduced a new cybersecurity law, which criminalises criticising the government online and forces internet providers to give authorities' user data when requested, sparking claims of a "totalitarian" crackdown on dissent. The law, which mirrors China's draconian internet rules, came into effect on 1 January and forces internet providers to censor content deemed "toxic" by the ruling communist government. Vietnam's ministry of public security said it will tackle "hostile and reactionary forces", but human rights groups said it was authorities' latest method of silencing free speech."