"Hultquist noted that cyberwarfare evens the battlefield between Iran and the US. "That's why they choose an asymmetric battleground," he said. "We might have this massive advantage with a very sophisticated ability, but we also have this very sophisticated society that makes us very vulnerable to computer attacks.""
"At that point, experts began taking a closer look at the document, now publicly available on the web. They discovered something else of interest: yellow dots in a roughly rectangular pattern repeated throughout the page. They were barely visible to the naked eye, but formed a coded design. After some quick analysis, they seemed to reveal the exact date and time that the pages in question were printed: 06:20 on 9 May, 2017 - at least, this is likely to be the time on the printer's internal clock at that moment. The dots also encode a serial number for the printer. "
"Vivian Balakrishnan on why he had earlier said that TraceTogether app data would only be used for COVID-19 contact tracing. The Home Affairs Ministry has since said the data could be used for criminal investigations."
" To be clear, workers are regularly replaced by automation, but the speed and impact of robots taking jobs is routinely overstated in public discourse; very unlikely to accelerate during a recession; and is one of many other factors that affect or change the nature of 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."
"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."
"Functional genomics - a new area of science that looks at why small changes in a person's genetic make-up can increase the risk of diseases - deals with huge datasets. Each person has about 30,000 genes, which can be combined with others, as Hal Barron, GSK's chief scientific officer, explains. "You start to realise you're dealing with trillions and trillions of data points, even per experiment, and no human can interpret that, it's just too complicated.""
"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!"
"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."
"As the lava lamps bubble and swirl, a video camera on the ceiling monitors their unpredictable changes and connects the footage to a computer, which converts the randomness into a virtually unhackable code.
Why use lava lamps for encryption instead of computer-generated code? Since computer codes are created by machines with relatively predictable patterns, it is entirely possible for hackers to guess their algorithms, posing a security risk. Lava lamps, on the other hand, add to the equation the sheer randomness of the physical world, making it nearly impossible for hackers to break through."
""There is no substitute for in-person collaboration and connection," said Take-Two Interactive Software CEO Strauss Zelnick.
This is especially true for those who are in management roles in a firm, who find that actual management and mentoring is best done offline. The same goes for relationship-building, spontaneity, and creativity."
"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""
"Some standards did spread and crystallise over time, as more books were printed and literacy rates climbed. The printing profession played a key role in these emergent norms. Printing houses developed habits for spelling frequent words, often based on what made setting type more efficient. In a manuscript, hadde might be replaced with had; thankefull with thankful. When it came to spelling, the primary objective wasn't to faithfully represent the author's spelling, nor to uphold some standard idea of 'correct' English - it was to produce texts that people could read and, more importantly, that they would buy. Habits and tricks became standards, as typesetters learned their trade by apprenticing to other typesetters. They then often moved around as journeymen workers, which entailed dispersing their own habits or picking up those of the printing houses they worked in."
"Why are many Gen Zers averse to sending emails?
Because emails are too formal, and not as instant as other forms of communication. So it takes too much time to compose the messages, and then it's difficult to get the formal tone correct, which causes anxiety."
"Virtually every company and organisation now has - indeed has to have - an online presence. But many still take only rudimentary cybersecurity precautions and are sitting ducks for hackers. For most of companies, that's a matter for them and their boards of directors - it's their lookout if a ransomware attack makes them insolvent."
"The Nigerian government reinstated Twitter on Jan 13, 2022, after Twitter agreed to conditions issued by the Nigerian government, according to CNN.
Notably, one of these conditions includes "managing prohibited publication in line with Nigerian law".
Twitter also has to comply with "applicable tax obligations on its operations under Nigerian law" as well as enroll Nigeria in its Partner Support and Law Enforcement Portals."
"Why? Because it has an internal app store that puts its young player base to work making virtual stuff and selling it for scrip or peanuts while the company pockets the profits. It even promotes the far-right personalities and groups using it to recruit. It is a ruthless money machine that embodies the perverse incentives of social media, aimed directly at children and operated by amoral reptiles."
"Waymo and Cruise are now allowed to launch paid 24/7, fully autonomous driverless car services in San Francisco, state regulators decided Thursday.
Why it matters: This is the final approval in both companies' quests to launch their full-fledged services throughout San Francisco."
"Further, human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to create the world we live in today: science, technology, math, physics, chemistry, medicine, energy, construction, transportation, communication, art, music, culture, philosophy, ethics, morality. Without the application of intelligence on all these domains, we would all still be living in mud huts, scratching out a meager existence of subsistence farming. Instead we have used our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years.
What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence - and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars - much, much better from here."