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"The internet-freedom group Access Now recorded 75 internet outages in 2016, which more than doubled to 196 last year. "The tactic has been around for a while, but the rate at which it is being applied now is extremely alarming," says Berhan Taye, of the UK-based organisation."

"It may be coincidence that Trump's threat in August to shut down TikTok in the U.S. unless a sale was tendered with an American company drove the app into the arms of one of his allies."

"Dubbed typosquatting, the idea is simple (if devious): A hacker registers a domain that is close enough to a real site, like yourbanknarne.com, and puts up a clone of yourbankname.com. The unsuspecting victim goes to the wrong site by mistake, and enters their personal banking information. In doing so, they have inadvertently handed the digital keys to their account to a hacker. "

"KUALA LUMPUR: Facial recognition technology today is increasingly being used by law enforcement agencies, banks, hotels, airport and now convenience stores to detect and arrest criminals quickly. Kuala Lumpur Police chief Datuk Seri Mazlan Lazim said by the installation of facial recognition closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in convenience stores the faces of criminals can be clearly recorded to trace their identities."

"Those who design this stuff are plainly doing so for people close in age to themselves. But surely no harm would come from them considering whether their parents or grandparents would have any chance of fathoming out whatever new consumer electronics they are working on."

"Let's say you have an IoT device that is well protected with functions that can be accessed through a well-defined API; even if you can control the device through the API, you probably can't do too much harm. Firmware, the programming inside the device has logical constraints that don't allow you, for example, to close garage doors while someone is in the way of them or overheat a device so that it combusts.  We used to trust that hardware, such as a common kitchen appliance, could be trusted and could not be easily altered without physically dismounting the device. But with today's "smart" appliances, this is no longer the case."

"or its latest update, which it released Wednesday, the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub combined nine different mathematical models from different research groups to get an outlook for the pandemic for the next six months. "Any of us who have been following this closely, given what happened with delta, are going to be really cautious about too much optimism," says Justin Lessler at the University of North Carolina, who helps run the hub. "But I do think that the trajectory is towards improvement for most of the country," he says. The modelers developed four potential scenarios, taking into account whether or not childhood vaccinations take off and whether a more infectious new variant should emerge. "

"Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is considering charging users in the EU €13 (£11) a month to access an ad-free version of Instagram or Facebook on their phones, as the company grapples with regulatory pressure on how it uses people's data. Meta is also weighing a €17 charge to use Instagram and Facebook without adverts on desktop, according to sources close to the discussions. Accessing both apps on smartphones would cost about €19 a month."

"OpenAI has "discussed and debated quite extensively" when to release a tool that can determine whether an image was made with DALL-E 3, OpenAI's generative AI art model, or not. But the startup isn't close to making a decision anytime soon. That's according to Sandhini Agarwal, an OpenAI researcher who focuses on safety and policy, who spoke with TechCrunch in a phone interview this week. She said that, while the classifier tool's accuracy is "really good" - at least by her estimation - it hasn't met OpenAI's threshold for quality."

"The library outside St Pancras International station, which has one of the largest book collections in the world, said it has its own financial reserves and has not applied for extra funding. A spokesperson said: "The final costs of recovering from the recent cyber attack are still not confirmed. "The British Library and its Government sponsor, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), remain in close and regular contact."

""Once these technical photographic limitations of the image are determined, we can then zoom in as closely as possible to every edge of the subjects, in order to highlight where detail has been altered, knowing what should be sharp and what shouldn't. "As per the annotations, this reveals sharp transitions of detail, usually from hard edged selections [in the image editing programme Adobe Photoshop], which can be either straight or worked around curved areas of detail. "It's the juddering of straight-line detail that is the biggest telltale sign of multiple frames being composited together. This can be seen extensively around the hair, arms, and especially at the zip midway down the princess's jacket. Seeing repetition of detail in the finer areas also reveals the likely use of the cloning tool in Photoshop."

"And even without parental anxiety hemming them in: where are teens to go? In the last decade, YMCA data shows that more than 4,500 youth work jobs have been cut and 750 youth centres shut down. According to the Music Venue Trust, two grassroots music venues are closing every week. The nightclub industry is in freefall. Teenagers can't hang around in parks without arousing the suspicion of overprotective adults who have decided these rare recreational spaces belong to their toddlers alone; city squares and skate parks and pedestrian zones that were once public are now being insidiously privatised, monitored via CCTV and policed by private security guards. No wonder then, that teens withdraw to online video game worlds, the last spaces they have left that remain unmediated by their parents or other authority figures - the last places where they are mostly beyond the reach of adult control."

"Cancer diagnosis and management depend upon the extraction of complex information from microscopy images by pathologists, which requires time-consuming expert interpretation prone to human bias. Supervised deep learning approaches have proven powerful, but are inherently limited by the cost and quality of annotations used for training. Therefore, we present Histomorphological Phenotype Learning, a self-supervised methodology requiring no labels and operating via the automatic discovery of discriminatory features in image tiles. Tiles are grouped into morphologically similar clusters which constitute an atlas of histomorphological phenotypes (HP-Atlas), revealing trajectories from benign to malignant tissue via inflammatory and reactive phenotypes. These clusters have distinct features which can be identified using orthogonal methods, linking histologic, molecular and clinical phenotypes. Applied to lung cancer, we show that they align closely with patient survival, with histopathologically recognised tumor types and growth patterns, and with transcriptomic measures of immunophenotype. These properties are maintained in a multi-cancer study."

"Mats Steen's double life was first explored in 2019 by Norwegian public broadcaster NRK and then in a BBC News article, which inspired Norwegian film-maker Benjamin Ree to tell the story as a documentary. "I think his story asks some questions that are really relevant today," he says. "Is it possible to become friends with someone you've never met? Is it possible to experience love with somebody you've never met? And how close a friendship can you have with someone you've never spoken to, just written to? And at the same time, I think it says something about the generational gap, about my generation's fascination for gaming - I'm 35 years old - and being in a virtual world. Mats really came of age within that game. Also, both Mats's friends and family have told me that towards the end of his life, he really wanted to have mattered. He seemed to have lived such a short life, but he wanted to be remembered.""

"For higher-complexity problems, however, the models would enter "collapse", failing to generate any correct solutions. In one case, even when provided with an algorithm that would solve the problem, the models failed. The paper said: "Upon approaching a critical threshold - which closely corresponds to their accuracy collapse point - models counterintuitively begin to reduce their reasoning effort despite increasing problem difficulty." The Apple experts said this indicated a "fundamental scaling limitation in the thinking capabilities of current reasoning models"."

""Equal access does imply equal opportunities," says the report, which goes on to point out that while anyone can use the internet to learn about the world, improve their skills or apply for a well-paid job, disadvantaged students are less likely to be aware of the opportunities that digital technology offers. "They may not have the knowledge or skills required to turn online opportunities into real opportunities," the report says."

""Mexico's capacity to spy on its citizens is immense. [And] it's extremely easy for the technology and the information obtained through the spyware to fall into private hands - be it organised crime or commercial," said Jorge Rebolledo, a Mexico City security consultant. "What we know about is only the tip of the iceberg." Andrés Manuel López Obrador Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The data leak is a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, since 2016, are believed to have been selected as belonging to people of interest by government clients of NSO Group."