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"It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. "But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it-a broader impact on trust," he said. "Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can't trust anything, and other people are being misled about it-well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself." Nyhan had a similar reaction. "There are genuine questions that are really important, but there's a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. There's so much focus on sweeping claims that aren't actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better." He added, "We're years into this, and we're still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It's totally wild.""

"This effectively ensured that all South Koreans are forced to use Internet Explorer. To this day, OS X and Linux hasn't seen the same degree of adoption in Korea as it has in Europe, China and the United States. It also means that 75% of South Korean netizens use some variety of IE because… Well? They have to. It also means that many South Korean websites are fundamentally less advanced, less user friendly and much less secure than their Western counterparts. The cruel irony is that this government intervention effectively hamstrung an entire industry"

"An online self-help programme that helps people sleep better is more effective than face-to-face psychological therapy, a study involving over 7,000 NHS patients has found. Sleepio, a six-week digital treatment for insomnia, helped 56% of users beat the condition, whereas the success rate in NHS Improving access to psychological therapy (Iapt) services is 50%."

"The most effective of the existing bans on government face surveillance have crucial elements in common. They broadly define the technology, provide effective mechanisms for any community member to take legal enforcement action should the ordinance be violated, and limit the use of any information acquired in an inadvertent breach of the prohibition."

"Analyst Brian Nowak estimates that the AI technology will have a $4.1 trillion economic effect on the labor force - or affect about 44% of labor - over the next few years by changing input costs, automating tasks and shifting the ways companies obtain, process and analyze information. Today, Morgan Stanley pegs the AI effect at $2.1 trillion, affecting 25% of labor. "We see generative AI expanding the scope of business processes that can be automated," he wrote in a Sunday note. "At the same time, the input costs supporting GenAI functionality are rapidly falling, enabling a strongly expansionary impact to software production. As a result, Generative AI is set to impact the labor markets, expand the enterprise software TAM, and drive incremental spend for Public Cloud services.""

"Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable. This confidence must be well justified and increase with the magnitude of a system's potential effects. OpenAI's recent statement regarding artificial general intelligence, states that "At some point, it may be important to get independent review before starting to train future systems, and for the most advanced efforts to agree to limit the rate of growth of compute used for creating new models." We agree. That point is now."

"Liverpool are using incredible data science during matches, and effects are extraordinary Liverpool's sport-leading data science is providing Jürgen Klopp with the tools to change football matches as they're happening."

"While many apps and related technologies are voluntary, other governments are enforcing their use, since health experts say at least 60 per cent of a population needs to activate them for contact tracing to be effective."

"Nepal has said it will ban TikTok, citing negative effects on the country's "social harmony". The popular video-sharing platform, which has around a billion monthly users, has faced restrictions in many countries for alleged breaches of data rules and for the potentially harmful impact on youth of some content. "The decision to ban was made today, and relevant authorities are currently addressing the technical issues," the minister for communications and information technology, Rekha Sharma, said on Monday."

"The company, which hosts 1.7m sites in the UK, said an error made during maintenance "effectively deleted" what was on some of its servers. "We can conclude that the issues faced have resulted in some data loss for some customers," the firm admitted. It started a "recovery process", but advised customers with their own data backup to rebuild their own websites."

"But with the Snowden revelations and the widespread understanding of ubiquitous Internet surveillance (something that a minority was always aware of, of course), sociologists have observed a marked chilling effect on political and social discourse, as people who disagree with the majority fear that their searches and discussions will be observed, correlated, logged and use to ascribe guilt to them. "

"Anyone who has driven a car through an unfamiliar place can attest to how easy it is to let GPS do all the work. That GPS can have a transformative effect on a society is undeniable. We have come to depend on a technology that, in theory, makes it impossible to get lost. But not only are we still getting lost, we may actually be losing a part of ourselves."

"A state judge in the Brazilian state of Sergipe has ordered all mobile phone operators in the country to block Facebook-owned WhatsApp for 72 hours, nationwide. Those five telecom providers put the ban into effect today, and it affects about 100 million people. In Brazil, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app."

"Google's neural networks have achieved the dream of CSI viewers everywhere: the company has revealed a new AI system capable of "enhancing" an eight-pixel square image, increasing the resolution 16-fold and effectively restoring lost data. The neural network could be used to increase the resolution of blurred or pixelated faces, in a way previously thought impossible; a similar system was demonstrated for enhancing images of bedrooms, again creating a 32x32 pixel image from an 8x8 one."

"Five thousand bees will be fitted with the tiny 2.5 mm square RFID chips, which will allow the scientists to track their movements much like a toll tag on your car lets the roadway authority know when you drive past a certain point. Bees tend to fly in regular repeatable patterns, so any changes in their activity will be easy to spot. To tag the bees, they are placed in a refrigerator to make them immobile, then the tags are simply attached with adhesive. The researchers say that the tag has no effect on a bee's behavior, but how would you like to have a big square chip glued to the back of your neck?"

""If their website goes down as a result of an attack, they can lose their SEO ranking or it could have an effect on their brand, there is a lot at stake aside from revenues," he said."

Huge chunks of the Internet will be effectively unreachable, and which sites go into the censorship bucket will be decided upon in secret, by unelected employees of big corporations, like China's Huawei. Sure, you can untick the box if you want, but as David Cameron's advisors will tell you, defaults are powerful and most users never change them.

"The reason is that routine big-data analytical techniques can now effectively manufacture personal data that is not protected by any of the measures we've used up to now. A well-known illustration of this is the way Target, an American retail chain, creatively collated scattered pieces of data about individuals' changes in shopping habits to predict the delivery date of pregnant shoppers - so that they could then be targeted with relevant advertisements."

"This stuff is far more complicated than calibrating safe following distances or even braking for a loose soccer ball. Goodall writes: "There is no obvious way to effectively encode complex human morals in software.""

"Ddos attacks have been used to cause both financial and reputational damage to businesses and services from Sony to government websites. The attacks can last from hours to days, and typically use computers or internet routers infected with viruses to make innocent users unwitting parties to the attack. The Lizard Stresser tool was used effectively by Lizard Squad during cyber attacks on Microsoft's Xbox Live and Sony's PlayStation Network online gaming services in December last year."