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"I've got a theory of change I call the "peak indifference" theory. The early stage of a crisis involves trying to convince people that the crisis even exists, because things haven't gotten really terrible yet and it's not obvious that there's anything to really worry about, and the people who profit from the status quo will spend liberally to convince people that there's no reason to worry or change anything (see also: climate change, Facebook, cancer from smoking)."

"The new feature, part of a wider set of tools covering "off-Facebook activity", will not delete anything from Facebook's servers, instead simply "disconnecting" data from an individual user's account."

"Therefore, under EU law in force since May 2011, people must give their consent before an anti-ad-blocker script can run and hide content on a page. Of course, while waiting for that consent from a visitor, the site could refuse to show anything, but then the publisher will scare off all readers, even the ones who turn out to be not running anti-ad plugins. If the page is viewable while waiting for the consent, then blocking ad-blockers is pointless."

"While Google has played down the notion of rolling out anything soon (it will take years until Glass builds up enough users to make it worthwhile), marketers can't stop buzzing about the possibility of paying for ads in the physical world based on user engagement and reactions. The patent even details how a device like Google Glass could infer a user's emotional response to an ad - whether they were happy, sad or indifferent - and adjust pricing accordingly."

""As we have said now for more than years, fingerprints should not be used to secure anything. You leave them everywhere, and it is far too easy to make fake fingers out of lifted prints."

"Software is writing news stories with increasing frequency. In a recent example, an LA Times writer-bot wrote and posted a snippet about an earthquake three minutes after the event. The LA Times claims they were first to publish anything on the quake, and outside the USGS, they probably were."

"Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well. Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades. Call Center Employees call-center Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient. Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you. But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls. Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves. At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced

"And that means that there's now a financial incentive for going after just about anything. While the payoff of going after businesses' networks used to depend on the long play-working deep into the network, finding and packaging data, smuggling it back out-ransomware attacks don't require that level of sophistication today. It's now much easier to convert hacks into cash."

"His software is not labeled anything as grand as artificial intelligence. It's machine learning, facilitating and extending his own words, his own imagination. At one level, it merely helps him do what fledgling writers have always done - immerse themselves in the works of those they want to emulate. Hunter Thompson, for instance, strived to write in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, so he retyped "The Great Gatsby" several times as a shortcut to that objective."

"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."

"However, there's a new breed of video and audio manipulation tools, made possible by advances in artificial intelligence and computer graphics, that will allow for the creation of realistic looking footage of public figures appearing to say, well, anything. Trump declaring his proclivity for water sports. Hillary Clinton describing the stolen children she keeps locked in her wine cellar. Tom Cruise finally admitting what we suspected all along … that he's a Brony."

"Unfortunately, her legacy will be dominated by that tweet. If you type her name into Google, you'll have to scroll for a long, long, long time before you find anything unrelated to it."

"The company has revealed the latest evolution of the Captcha (short, sort of, for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), which aims to do away with any interruption at all: the new, "invisible reCaptcha" aims to tell whether a given visitor is a robot or not purely by analysing their browsing behaviour. Barring a short wait while the system does its job, a typical human visitor shouldn't have to do anything else to prove they're not a robot."

"Through special TV boxes installed in their homes, local residents could watch live security footage and press a button to summon police if they saw anything amiss."

"It's actually a big myth that search engines need to track your personal search history to make money or deliver quality search results. Almost all of the money search engines make (including Google) is based on the keywords you type in, without knowing anything about you, including your search history or the seemingly endless amounts of additional data points they have collected about registered and non-registered users alike. In fact, search advertisers buy search ads by bidding on keywords, not people….This keyword-based advertising is our primary business model. "

"Officials had previously explicitly ruled out the data would be used for anything other than the virus tracking. But parliament was told on Monday it could also be used "for the purpose of criminal investigation"."

"The showman CEO has argued that with full self-driving capabilities, Tesla cars can make money for their owners. Tesla would additionally make money from operating a robotaxi fleet. If the tests conducted by Consumer Report are anything to go by, this is unlikely to happen soon."

"All of this led Estonia to two inevitable conclusions. The first was that residency didn't have to have anything to do with geography. And so in 2014, e-residency was born."

""How are we going to trust anything electronically mediated in the very near future? What do we do when anyone can imitate anyone else, for any reason that suits them?""