Group items tagged

"Google reveals driverless car prototype First of 100 test vehicles is unveiled with no steering wheel or pedals, two seats and a top speed of 25mph"

"In his most extensive public comments to date Snowden sought to answer critics who have said his actions damaged US national security or that the threat from the secret government surveillance he revealed was overblown. Snowden was interviewed by the NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who travelled to Moscow for the meeting"

"Just a few days after Turkey's scandal-rocked government banned Twitter by tweaking national DNS settings, the state has doubled down by ordering ISPs to block Twitter's IP addresses, in response to the widespread dissemination of alternative DNS servers, especially Google's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (these numbers were even graffitied on walls). "

"Prominent Bahraini activist Nabeel Rajab was sentenced to six months in jail on Tuesday after criticizing the country's security forces on Twitter. Rajab was arrested in October for tweeting that Bahrain's security organizations are "ideological incubators" for those who join terrorist groups."

"But the Turkish government has a plan to keep its youngsters from witnessing too much violence: it is calling to ban Minecraft. "

"Pearson is apparently monitoring social media, to detect signs of cheating during exams. That's insanely creepy, and a horrible violation. "And for those who think "Well, its Twitter, its public", remember this: So is walking down the street. But is it OK for the government to monitor us with street surveillance cameras and send us fines for not crossing with the crosswalk?" via Pearson Caught Spying On Students. Big Brother Is Here. "

"The BBC complained that a 2007 article about the ousting of Merrill Lynch's CEO had been pulled from certain Google searches in Europe. The Guardian revealed that six articles had been pulled from search results, including three from as far back as 2010 about a Scottish referee who was forced to resign after lying about a penalty and one from 2011 about French workers making Post-it art."

"At 221 of the Fortune 500 companies, Fortune magazine's list of the the top 500 U.S. public corporations ranked by gross revenue, employees' credentials are posted publicly online for hackers to steal and reuse in cyberattacks, according to new research from the web intelligence firm Recorded Future. "

"The UK is opposing an international ban on so-called "killer robots" at a United Nations conference that is this week examining future developments of what are officially termed lethal autonomous weapons systems (Laws)."

"The OS is a marvel of paranoid terribleness, with lots of marvellously bad features. The one I was most interested in is its covert insertion of watermarks into every file that it touches, either on the OS's launch disk or removable USB sticks."

"The US government is researching technology that it hopes will turn soldiers into cyborgs, allowing them to connect directly to computers. The US military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has unveiled a research programme called Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) which aims to develop an implantable neural interface, connecting humans directly to computers."

"Twitter has deleted more than 125,000 accounts linked to terrorists since mid-2015, the company announced, offering some of the most detailed insight yet of how Silicon Valley is collaborating with western governments in its fight against Islamic State."

"Apple has warned the UK government that proposals in the draft Investigatory Powers Bill to demand technology firms weaken encryption would make the data of millions of law-abiding citizens less secure and make it easier for hackers to "cause chaos"."

"China's internet censors have cracked down on searches about the Panama Papers, a massive leak of documents that reportedly tie the relatives of current and retired Chinese politicians, including President Xi Jinping, to offshore companies used for tax evasion. The reports by an international coalition of media outlets working with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, or ICIJ, are based on documents from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the world's biggest creators of shell companies."

"GCHQ, the UK's spy agency, designed a security protocol for voice-calling called MIKEY-SAKKE and announced that they'll only certify VoIP systems as secure if they use MIKEY-SAKKE, and it's being marketed as "government-grade security." But a close examination of MIKEY-SAKKE reveals some serious deficiencies. The system is designed from the ground up to support "key escrow" -- that is, the ability of third parties to listen in on conversations without the callers knowing about it."

"More than 10m tweets sent by state actors attempting to influence US politics have been released to the public, forming one of the largest archives of political misinformation ever collated. The database reveals the astonishing extent of two misinformation campaigns, which spent more than five years sowing discord in the US and had spillover effects in other national campaigns, including Britain's EU referendum."

"The founders of Predictim want to be clear with me: Their product-an algorithm that scans the online footprint of a prospective babysitter to determine their "risk" levels for parents-is not racist. It is not biased. "We take ethics and bias extremely seriously," Sal Parsa, Predictim's CEO, tells me warily over the phone. "In fact, in the last 18 months we trained our product, our machine, our algorithm to make sure it was ethical and not biased. We took sensitive attributes, protected classes, sex, gender, race, away from our training set. We continuously audit our model. And on top of that we added a human review process.""

"The adoption of security chips has not slowed credit card fraud, either. 60,000,000 US credit cards were compromised in the past 12 months and 90% of those were chip-enabled. The majority of compromised cards were stolen by infected point-of-sale terminals. The US has the worst credit card security in the world. The findings come from a Gemini Advisory report, which blames a "lack of chip compliance" in merchants for the rise."

""My concern is that a facial recognition rejection can [create] bias," said Rudolph. "So, if someone has a lot of faith in this technology and thinks that it's foolproof, and someone is rejected by this system, that customs officer or gate agent may be predisposed to saying this person is traveling with fraudulent credentials. That's a crime and a serious issue.""