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"EFF's Legal Director Corynne McSherry offers five lessons to keep in mind: 1. (Lots of) mistakes will be made: copyright takedowns result in the removal of tons of legitimate content. 2. Robots won't help: automated filtering tools like Content ID have been a disaster, and policing copyright with algorithms is a lot easier than policing "bad speech." 3. These systems need to be transparent and have due process. A system that allows for automated instant censorship and slow, manual review of censorship gives a huge advantage to people who want to abuse the system. 4. Punish abuse. The ability to censor other peoples' speech is no joke. If you're careless or malicious in your takedown requests, you should pay a consequence: maybe a fine, maybe being barred form using the takedown system. 5. Voluntary moderation quickly becomes mandatory. Every voluntary effort to stem copyright infringement has been followed by calls to make those efforts mandatory (and expand them)."

"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.""

""The problem," Leveson wrote in a book, "is that we are attempting to build systems that are beyond our ability to intellectually manage.""

"Robots, artificial intelligence and smart speakers will ease the burden on doctors and give them more time with patients, according to an NHS report on the pending technological "revolution" in healthcare. Developments in the ability to sequence individuals' genomes - the entirety of their genetic data - will also spur on advances, according to the review published on Monday."

"The revelation that encrypted email is vulnerable to a variety of devastating attacks (collectively known as "Efail") has set off a round of soul-searching by internet security researchers and other technical people -- can we save email? One way to think about Efail is that it was caused by a lack of central coordination and control over email-reading programs -- the underlying protocols are strong and robust, but they can be implemented in ways that create real problems. In particular, the ability to show HTML inside a message makes email very hard to secure:"

"More controversially, however, Genomic Prediction is also offering IVF patients the option of screening embryos for projected cognitive ability."

"Scientists have taken a step forward in their ability to decode what a person is saying just by looking at their brainwaves when they speak."

"At its core, the researchers' "Planning with Uncertain Specifications" (PUnS) system gives robots the human-like planning ability to simultaneously weigh many ambiguous - and potentially contradictory - requirements to reach an end goal. In doing so, the system always chooses the most likely action to take, based on a "belief" about some probable specifications for the task it is supposed to perform."

"A draft government memo explaining how the NHS contact-tracing app could stem the spread of the coronavirus said ministers might be given the ability to order "de-anonymisation" to identify people from their smartphones, the Guardian can reveal. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced on Sunday that the UK planned to introduce an app that would enable people who developed Covid-19 symptoms to "anonymously" alert other users to whom they had been in close proximity. "All data will be handled according to the highest ethical and security standards, and would only be used for NHS care and research," he said."

"Common-sense reasoning - the ability to make mundane inferences using basic knowledge about the world, like the fact that "matches" plus "logs" usually equals "fire" - has resisted AI researchers' efforts for decades."

"Lexplore claims its technology is new-particularly the algorithm that separates typical from atypical readers. But the concepts it's based on aren't. Its tech draws from a deep well of previously-conducted research stretching back decades, which is generally supportive of using a combination of eye tracking and machine learning to screen for dyslexia. "Eye movements is one of the best ways to index reading ability at an incredibly in-depth level," says Julie Kirkby, a psychology professor at Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom, who has studied eye tracking and dyslexia for years."

"Today we fear a different technological threat, one that centers not on machines but other humans. We see ourselves as imperiled by the terrifying social influence unleashed by the Internet in general and social media in particular. We hear warnings that nothing less than our collective ability to perceive reality is at stake, and that if we do not take corrective action we will lose our freedoms and way of life."

"The researchers programmed a robot called Pepper, made by SoftBank Robotics, with the ability to vocalise its thought processes. This means the robot is no longer a "black box" and its underlying decision-making is more transparent to the user."

"When researchers looked at data measuring respondents' online behaviour, those with inflated perceptions of their abilities more frequently visited websites linked to the spread of false or misleading news. The overconfident participants were also less able to distinguish between true and false claims about current events and reported higher willingness to share false content, especially when it aligned with their political predispositions, the authors found."

""This is the largest impact on the energy system in the United States we've seen from a cyberattack, full stop," says Rob Lee, CEO of the critical-infrastructure-focused security firm Dragos. Aside from the financial impact on Colonial Pipeline or the many providers and customers of the fuel it transports, Lee points out that around 40 percent of US electricity in 2020 was produced by burning natural gas, more than any other source. That means, he argues, that the threat of cyberattacks on a pipeline presents a significant threat to the civilian power grid. "You have a real ability to impact the electric system in a broad way by cutting the supply of natural gas. This is a big deal," he adds. "I think Congress is going to have questions. A provider got hit with ransomware from a criminal act, this wasn't even a state-sponsored attack, and it impacted the system in this way?""

"Robinhood's free-trading revolution helped pave the way to the recent Reddit mayhem on Wall Street. The rise of Robinhood means that the ability to buy stocks, on a whim, is now at everyone's fingertips. Robinhood has opened investing up to the masses. Rival online brokerages were forced to mimic Robinhood's zero-commission business model, and some joined forces just to survive. "

"The disclosure points to a problem security researchers have been warning about for years: that despite its reputation for building what is seen by millions of customers as a secure product, some believe Apple's closed culture and fear of negative press have harmed its ability to provide security for those targeted by governments and criminals. "Apple's self-assured hubris is just unparalleled," said Patrick Wardle, a former NSA employee and founder of the Mac security developer Objective-See. "They basically believe that their way is the best way. And to be fair … the iPhone has had incredible success. "But you talk to any external security researcher, they're probably not going to have a lot of great things to say about Apple. Whereas if you talk to security researchers in dealing with, say, Microsoft, they've said: 'We're gonna put our ego aside, and ultimately realise that the security researchers are reporting vulnerabilities that at the end of the day are benefiting our users, because we're able to patch them.' I don't think Apple has that same mindset.""

"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.""

"Apple and Google's tougher enforcement could preclude such apps from becoming realistic alternatives to the mainstream social networks. They now face the choice of either stepping up their policing of posts - undercutting their main feature in the process - or losing their ability to reach a wide audience."

"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. "