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"The judges considered three aspects of digital surveillance: bulk interception of communications, intelligence sharing and obtaining of communications data from communications service providers. By a majority of five to two votes, the Strasbourg judges found that GCHQ's bulk interception regime violated article 8 of the European convention on human rights, which guarantees privacy, because there were said to be insufficient safeguards, and rules governing the selection of "related communications data" were deemed to be inadequate."

"Why do some people get so upset, especially in an age where many people are taking digital detoxes for mental-health breaks, and others are busy juggling life tasks? People still communicate in different ways; some are constantly attached to their phones, while others want to disengage from them for chunks of time. But tensions over reply times may also come down to social norms - or the lack thereof. New developments in digital technology have outpaced the formulation of mutually agreed new communication paradigms, so when a text is sent, we're not all responding according to the same 'rules'."

"The promise of Community Notes lies in its transparency and its ability to crowdsource moderation from across ideological divides. By emphasizing consensus, the system avoids the mistrust or perception of bias with platform-driven fact-checking or content removal. Last year YouTube adopted this approach, but as a complement to other products such as information panels, or their recent disclosure requirement when content is altered or synthetic."

""The satellite's two-year mission will be to develop 'hack-proof' quantum communications, allowing users to send messages securely and at speeds faster than light," Xinhua reported."

"Yet the balance of experimental evidence over the past thirty years suggests that this is not the case. Not only would removing anonymity fail to consistently improve online community behavior - forcing real names in online communities could also increase discrimination and worsen harassment."

"In response, the architects of the internet developed a kind of digital Esperanto: a common language that enabled data to travel across any network. In 1974, two Arpa researchers named Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf published an early blueprint. Drawing on conversations happening throughout the international networking community, they sketched a design for "a simple but very flexible protocol": a universal set of rules for how computers should communicate."

"America's National Security Agency gathers unfathomable mountains of Internet communications from fiber optic taps and other means, but it says it only retains and searches the communications of "targeted" individuals who've done something suspicious. Guess what? If you read Boing Boing, you've been targeted."

"There are three big challenges in the Internet space that all countries must face in the near future. China's approach to the challenges will impact not only Chinese Internet users, but potentially all Internet users. What interface follows the smart hone, whether it be AR-enabled glasses, foldable screens, or wearable projectors, will not only be influenced by China's substantial Internet-using population, but also by their manufacturing. Privacy, as it relates to online information collecting and sale, has consequences for broader community standards, and there is no one-size fits all approach to this issue. China must engage their own ethicists, community, government and technologists to develop a solution that works for China. Finally, globalization. Most of China's internet success has been within China, but as China begins to consider how it might attract users from outside its borders, it will need to consider dialing back the protections that have held foreign Internet companies at bay."

"Digital Identity (ID) is one of the main results focused under the main Digital Drukyul Flagship Program of Nu 2.557 bn as the fund also covers results such as Institutionalizing e-Patient Information System, creating Digital Schools, Integrating e-business services (business licensing and Single window for trade), Land records, tax information etc. Citing some examples of what benefits people can expect with the completion of the Digital ID Lobzang Jamtsho, Chief ICT Officer, Application Development Division, Department of Technology and Telecom (DITT) under Ministry of Information and Communication (MoIC) said stated, "Currently the online processes are hybrid in nature, where although we communicate or negotiate online, people still need to be physically present to sign a contract or make online transactions." He said that with the use of Digital ID, one can have bank transactions or even sign up contracts remotely to state a few components that the program encapsulates. The paper found that the biggest advantage of the Digital ID of the person is that all the information of the person will be stored and based around the Digital ID of the person. This could be health records, land records, tax records, revenue and bank records, business records, education records, census records etc. The person can use his digital ID to access all this information and also use his ID to complete online procedures to avail services. To protect the privacy of the person access to the information will be compartmentalized and restricted so some tax officials for example cannot access the health records of a person. A key component of digital ID is collecting the biometric details of people like eyes and all finger prints for verification and security."

"Stress is the common factor in many behaviours widely understood to be bad for our health - drinking too much booze, smoking cigarettes, even eating unhealthy food. (There is some evidence to suggest that cortisol - the hormone released when we feel stress - makes us crave high fat and sugary foods.) And, these days, many of life's stressors are communicated via the mobile phone. I cannot stop these stressors, but by turning off notifications, I can at least stop them ambushing me. It's an action that helps me regain some sense of control. For example, when I open up a news app, I am ready to find out what is happening in the world. It is different from being in the supermarket cheese aisle and getting an alert, where - as part of a whole barrage of communications - I may feel blindsided."

"There is also a lot of research that both third-party fact-checking and Community Notes can be really effective at reducing misperceptions. But - and this is a significant caveat - neither works well as a complete solution for lies on social media. When Twitter was working on Birdwatch, they claimed it would "not replace other labels and fact checks Twitter currently uses". But as I've written about before, Musk scaled back Twitter's Trust and Safety team significantly and positioned Community Notes as the replacement. As Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of Trust and Safety, told WIRED, "The intention of Birdwatch was always to be a complement to, rather than a replacement for, Twitter's other misinformation methods." In fact, research on various attempts to mitigate COVID misinformation found that a layered, "Swiss cheese" approach might work best, where some efforts work well sometimes, but collectively the system catches most falsehoods."

"It's like turning the clock back to a more earnest time on the web, when the novelty of having a voice or being able to connect with anyone still filled us with a sense of boundless opportunity and optimism. It harkens back to the late 1990s and early 2000s-before social media, before smartphones-when going online was still a valuable use of time to seek community."

"By then, calls over social media for crowds to gather in areas of Cairo, and converge in public spaces had built an unstoppable momentum. "Social media was the most important tool in the revolution," said Abdelkarim. "People could communicate very easily and express themselves without any censorship." Mubarak's police state was over run by dissenters with smartphones and Facebook accounts."

"Zuckerberg has said that the platform, which has more than 3 billion people worldwide logging on to its apps every day, will be adopting an Elon Musk-style community notes format for policing what is and isn't acceptable speech on its platforms. Starting in the US, the company will be dramatically shifting the Overton window towards whoever can shout the loudest. The Meta CEO all but admitted that the move was politically motivated. "It's time to get back to our roots around free expression," he said, confessing that "restrictions on topics like immigration and gender […] are out of touch with mainstream discourse". He admitted to past "censorship mistakes" - here, probably meaning the past four years of tamping down political speech while a Democratic president was in office - and said he would "work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more"."

"Google is using romance novels to teach its artificial intelligence (AI) system to better understand how people communicate. Researchers at Google Brain, the company's AI-focused deep learning project, presented a paper earlier this month that detailed techniques they used to teach its AI to write fiction - and the results were unexpectedly haunting."

"Ingram, a 60-year-old Uber driver in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, had just learned that Uber would be deploying autonomous cars to accept fares in her city within weeks. The announcement on Thursday morning sent shockwaves through the community of about 4,000 drivers that serve Pennsylvania's second largest city. "

"re than a thousand British schools are monitoring pupils' online communication for bullying and self-harm using software that analyses and translates slang for teachers. The software uses a constantly updated dictionary which includes words that most adults would not understand. These include acronyms such as "gnoc" (get naked on camera) and "dirl" (die in real life) and words such as Bio-Oil, a commercial product which can be used by children who self-harm to reduce the appearance of scarring."