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"The Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) - which collaborated with ICA to roll out the scanning system - said in a statement that iris patterns have a higher degree of variation and uniqueness as compared to fingerprints, and are therefore "more robust and reliable.""

"If anything, I think in the 50s and 60s - because so few people had direct experience of computers - there was even more concern than there is now. Computers were associated with vast power. It was only with the arrival in the 1980s and 1990s of the personal computer we were sold the idea that the technology was participatory and liberal. I think we have returned, in a way, to the original fears, now we sense that these personal devices very much represent the power of vast corporations. "

""Our job as teachers and professors is not to surveil and police our students, but it's to educate them," he says. "You are assuming that students are trying to cheat-rather than assuming students are trying to learn and help them learn." He sees the growing adoption of automated proctoring tools as a continuation of a trend started by plagiarism-detection services like Turnitin, which he says were built on the assumption that students want to cheat and must be policed. But despite early pushback by students and some professors, plagiarism detection has become ubiquitous. Parry worries the same thing could happen with automated proctoring."

"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.""

"In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19b, and promised users that it wouldn't harvest their data and mix it with the surveillance troves it got from Facebook and Instagram. It lied. Years later, Facebook mixes data from all of its properties, mining it for data that ultimately helps advertisers, political campaigns and fraudsters find prospects for whatever they're peddling. Today, Facebook is in the process of acquiring Giphy, and while Giphy currently doesn't track users when they embed GIFs in messages, Facebook could start doing that anytime"

"Activists swiftly warned that the policy as it was published would backfire. The policy was vague and had been put together without much input from the communities most vulnerable to harassment and doxxing, the activists argued. They had little faith in Twitter's reporting and appeals process, which they described as unreliable, automated and allowing for little discussion about the enforcement of policies."

"Emmanuel Macron is facing a backlash after threatening to cut off social media networks as a means of stopping the spread of violence during periods of unrest. Élysée officials and government ministers responded on Wednesday by insisting the president was not threatening a "general blackout" but instead the "occasional and temporary" suspension of platforms. The president's comments came as ministers blamed young people using social media such as Snapchat and TikTok for organising and encouraging rioting and violence after the shooting dead of a teenager during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb last week."

"One of the many policy-based projects I worked on at Meta was Engagement Bait, which is defined as "a tactic that urges people to interact with Facebook posts through likes, shares, comments, and other actions in order to artificially boost engagement and get greater reach." Accordingly, "Posts and Pages that use this tactic will be demoted." To do this, "models are built off of certain guidelines" trained using "hundreds of thousands of posts" that "teams at Facebook have reviewed and categorized." The examples provided are obvious (eg. a post saying "comment "Yes" if you love rock as much as I do"), but the problem is that there will always be far subtler ways to get people to engage with something artificially. As an example, psychology researchers have a long history of studying negativity bias, which has been shown to operate across a wide array of domains, and to lead to increased online engagement. "

"The software tracks how long a document is open, how the employee uses the document and logs the time as work. Weeks later, the company said an analysis "identified irregularities between her timesheets and the software usage logs". While Besse told the tribunal she found the program "difficult" and worried it didn't differentiate between work and personal use, the company demonstrated how TimeCamp automatically makes those distinctions, separating time logs for work from activities such as using the laptop to stream movies and television shows."

"Similarly to how voice cloning raises fears about the consequences of its potential misuse, increasingly many people worry that the proliferation of AI technology will put professionals' livelihoods at risk. At Eleven, we see a future in which voice actors are able to license their voices to train speech models for specific use, in exchange for fees. Clients and studios will still gladly feature professional voice talent in their projects and using AI will simply contribute to faster turnaround times and greater freedom to experiment and establish direction in early development. The technology will change how spoken audio is designed and recorded but the fact that voice actors no longer need to be physically present for every session really gives them the freedom to be involved in more projects at any one time, as well as to truly immortalize their voices."

"This is partially why online anonymity is so important - it gives people the grace of exploration and inquiry. It allows people to make choices, change their minds, learn, and grow. TikTok doesn't make room for this kind of internet exploration; it makes it impossible to have curiosity without consequence. TikTok isn't alone in using engagement and recommender algorithms to curate personalised content feeds, but it does take it to the extreme. This is profitable both because it keeps people scrolling and because there's very little difference between being able to personalise content and personalise ads."

"This takes us to Kerala in south India, home to about 34 million people. There, the communist-led state government is launching something called the Kerala Fibre Optical Network (KFON) - and it's a major milestone. (It is worth noting the irony that the communist government, which has a history of opposing the introduction of computers, is now at the forefront of this digital initiative.) In 2016, the state recognised the internet as a basic citizen's right, joining other polities like Finland, Costa Rica and France. Next on the agenda: making this new right mean something. Despite facing various setbacks - such as the pandemic and a corruption allegation that led to the arrest of the senior bureaucrat who was previously in charge of KFON (he denies the allegation) - the project has finally been launched. It's a fibre-optic broadband network project, aiming to provide affordable and reliable internet connectivity to every household, government institution and business entity in the state."

"If you've been job hunting recently, chances are you've interacted with a resume robot, a nickname for an Applicant Tracking System, or ATS. In its most basic form, an ATS acts like an online assistant, helping hiring managers write job descriptions, scan resumes and schedule interviews. As artificial intelligence advances, employers are increasingly relying on a combination of predictive analytics, machine learning and complex algorithms to sort through candidates, evaluate their skills and estimate their performance. Today, it's not uncommon for applicants to be rejected by a robot before they're connected with an actual human in human resources. The job market is ripe for the explosion of AI recruitment tools. Hiring managers are coping with deflated HR budgets while confronting growing pools of applicants, a result of both the economic downturn and the post-pandemic expansion of remote work. As automated software makes pivotal decisions about our employment, usually without any oversight, it's posing fundamental questions about privacy, accountability and transparency."

"Now, as more people use AI to produce and publish content, an obvious question arises: What happens as AI-generated content proliferates around the internet, and AI models begin to train on it, instead of on primarily human-generated content? A group of researchers from the UK and Canada have looked into this very problem and recently published a paper on their work in the open access journal arXiv. What they found is worrisome for current generative AI technology and its future: "We find that use of model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models.""

"Imagine having a digital twin that gets ill, and can be experimented on to identify the best possible treatment, without you having to go near a pill or a surgeon's knife. Scientists believe that within five to 10 years, "in silico" trials - in which hundreds of virtual organs are used to assess the safety and efficacy of drugs - could become routine, while patient-specific organ models could be used to personalise treatment and avoid medical complications. Digital twins are computational models of physical objects or processes, updated using data from their real-world counterparts. Within medicine, this means combining vast amounts of data about the workings of genes, proteins, cells and whole-body systems with patients' personal data to create virtual models of their organs - and eventually, potentially their entire body"

" This is wholly unacceptable behavior. Our books are copyrighted material, not free fodder for wealthy companies to use as they see fit, without permission or compensation. Many, many hours of serious research, creative angst and plain old hard work go into writing and publishing a book, and few writers are compensated like professional athletes, Hollywood actors or Wall Street investment bankers. Stealing our intellectual property hurts. Well, sure, Mr Cohan, but I have to point out: there are humans out there reading your books and getting ideas from them. Or at least, one sure hopes there are, because otherwise all those many hours of serious research etc have really gone to waste. As writers, if we don't influence what people think, what's the point? Furthermore, if we get a chance to influence what robots write, shouldn't we leap at it?"

"A boarding prep school in West Sussex, Cottesmore School, has made history by appointing an AI robot, Abigail Bailey, as its "principal headteacher". Created in collaboration with an artificial intelligence developer, the robot is designed to support the school's headmaster, Tom Rogerson, by providing advice on various issues such as supporting staff members and helping pupils with ADHD. Abigail Bailey functions similarly to the AI service ChatGPT, where users ask questions and receive answers from the chatbot's algorithms. The AI principal has been developed with extensive knowledge in machine learning and educational management, allowing it to analyze vast amounts of data. According to Mr. Rogerson, having the AI robot to assist him is calming and reassuring. He considers the role of a school leader to be lonely and believes that having an entity to rely on is invaluable. He also intends to make the publicly-available online robot accessible to state school headteachers."

"ow, legal redress is all very well, but it's usually beyond the resources of working artists. And lawsuits are almost always retrospective, after the damage has been done. It's sometimes better, as in rugby, to "get your retaliation in first". Which is why the most interesting news of the week was that a team of researchers at the University of Chicago have developed a tool to enable artists to fight back against permissionless appropriation of their work by corporations. Appropriately, it's called Nightshade and it "lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it's scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways" - dogs become cats, cars become cows, and who knows what else? (Boris Johnson becoming piglet, with added grease perhaps?) It's a new kind of magic. And the good news is that corporations might find it black. Or even deadly."

"ns Work in Progress It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber Test scores have been falling for years-even before the pandemic. By Derek Thompson A student looking at their phone Darrell Eager / Gallery Stock December 19, 2023 Saved Stories This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America's biggest problems. Sign up here. For the past few years, parents, researchers, and the news media have paid closer attention to the relationship between teenagers' phone use and their mental health. Researchers such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge have shown that various measures of student well-being began a sharp decline around 2012 throughout the West, just as smartphones and social media emerged as the attentional centerpiece of teenage life. Some have even suggested that smartphone use is so corrosive, it's systematically reducing student achievement. I hadn't quite believed that last argument-until now."

""Thanks to special copyright protections from Congress, woke corporations like Disney have earned billions while increasingly pandering to woke activists," Hawley said in a press release. "It's time to take away Disney's special privileges and open up a new era of creativity and innovation." His proposal would apply retroactively to copyright owners with a market capitalization of more than $150 billion in the motion pictures and videos or arts, entertainment, and recreation industries."