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"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."

"A woman whose 14-year-old son killed himself is calling for parents to be given the legal right to access their child's social media accounts to help understand why they died. Ellen Roome has gathered more than 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for social media companies to be required to hand over data to parents after a child has died. Under the current law, parents have no legal right to see whether their child was being bullied or threatened, was looking at self-harm images or other harmful content, or had expressed suicidal feelings online or searched for help with mental health problems."

Humans process thoughts at just 10 bits per second, according to a recent paper published by Caltech researchers. In contrast, a human's sensory organs gather data at a billion bits per second. So, if you ever feel overwhelmed by what is going on around you, it's only natural. The research paper, dubbed 'The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?' ponders the human neural substrate which limits thoughts to such a slow pace, and proposes new research to look into this 'bottleneck' now that it has been quantified.

"According to a new report from 404Media, as originally reported in Alexios Mantzarlis' Faked Up newsletter, the Crush AI modifier app receives the vast majority of its traffic from Meta platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. According to Similarweb's data, last month Crush AI received more than a quarter of a million visits to its service - and roughly 90 percent of that traffic was from Meta's platforms. Crush AI makes it quite clear what the purpose of its service is in its advertisements. The company's ads include photos of real-life individuals like Instagram influencer and model Mikayla Demaiter and OnlyFans creator Sophie Rain. The ads boast that users can "upload a photo" and "erase anyone's clothes.""

" 'Serious concerns' about DWP's use of AI to read correspondence from benefit claimants White mail system handles 'highly sensitive personal data' and people not told it is processing their information AI prototypes for UK welfare system dropped as officials lament 'false starts' Robert Booth UK technology editor Mon 27 Jan 2025 05.00 GMT Share When your mailbag brims with 25,000 letters and emails every day, deciding which to answer first is daunting. When lurking within are pleas for help from some of the country's most vulnerable people, the stakes only get higher. That is the challenge facing the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as correspondence floods in from benefit applicants and claimants - of which there are more than 20 million, including pensioners, in the UK. The DWP thinks it may have found a solution in using artificial intelligence to read it all first - including handwritten missives. Human reading used to take weeks and could leave the most vulnerable people waiting for too long for help. But "white mail" is an AI that can do the same work in a day and supposedly prioritise the most vulnerable cases for officials to get to first."

"Dartmouth College experts recently conducted the first clinical trial of an AI chatbot designed specifically for providing mental health assistance. Called Therabot, the AI assistant was tested in the form of an app among participants diagnosed with serious mental health problems across the United States. "The improvements in symptoms we observed were comparable to what is reported for traditional outpatient therapy, suggesting this AI-assisted approach may offer clinically meaningful benefits," notes Nicholas Jacobson, associate professor of biomedical data science and psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine."

"Despite these promises, concerns over privacy, security, and exclusion are growing. Critics, including Privacy International and Access Now, have raised alarm over the risks posed by poorly regulated digital ID systems. They caution, "Without strong safeguards, Africa's digital ID dream risks becoming a surveillance nightmare." Data breaches and inadequate legal frameworks further raise questions about whether these programs empower citizens or expose them to new vulnerabilities."

"Umi is a digital wellness platform and personalized family wellness coach that integrates AI and a community of experts. By consolidating wellness data into personalized, actionable pathways for every family, Umi helps people build healthy habits and connect through wellness routines that work for everyone. And by leveraging the power of Anthropic's Claude AI model, Umi benefits from the advanced reasoning capabilities to navigate the unique challenges faced by individuals and families."

"The findings from those examples were striking: overall, those who trusted the accuracy of the AI tools found themselves thinking less critically, while those who trusted the tech less used more critical thought when going back over AI outputs. "The data shows a shift in cognitive effort as knowledge workers increasingly move from task execution to oversight when using GenAI," the researchers wrote. "Surprisingly, while AI can improve efficiency, it may also reduce critical engagement, particularly in routine or lower-stakes tasks in which users simply rely on AI, raising concerns about long-term reliance and diminished independent problem-solving." This isn't enormously surprising. Something we've observed in many domains, from self-driving vehicles to scrutinizing news articles produced by AI, is that humans quickly go on autopilot when they're supposed to be overseeing an automated system, often allowing mistakes to slip past."

"Dozens of YouTube channels are mixing AI-generated images and videos with false claims about Sean "Diddy" Combs's blockbuster trial to pull in tens of millions of views on YouTube and cash in on misinformation. Twenty-six channels generated nearly 70m views from roughly 900 AI-infused Diddy videos over the past 12 months, according to data gathered from YouTube."

""Kids forget passwords all the time," says Alexander Cole, the chief executive of Edinburgh-based Peekabu. "They're often unfamiliar with the concept of logging in, there is often no username or social media account to remind them of their password when they forget it. And it's a real problem because the BBC's really keen to have children creating accounts, making friends with one another, and playing multiplayer games with their friends from the real world."

"The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet."

"Government agencies around the world demanded access to the information of over 38,000 Facebook users in the first half of this year, and more than half the orders came from the United States, the company said on Tuesday."

"More than 500 of the world's leading authors, including five Nobel prize winners, have condemned the scale of state surveillance revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and warned that spy agencies are undermining democracy and must be curbed by a new international charter."

"Taken as a whole, the information Google collects about users is shockingly complete. The company can mine your emails and Drive documents, track your browsing history, track the videos you watch on YouTube, obtain your WiFi passwords and much more."

The free antivirus software AVG is selling your online information for profit and you have no control over your privacy and security.

An interesting article, could affect alot of people also burn holes in your wallet.