Group items tagged

""We erase your past" declares the company's tagline. Eliminalia, which has offices in several cities including Barcelona and Kyiv, is part of a growing industry that will clean up your online profile. Officially the company performs "a deep search across the internet for all information - whether it be an article, a blog, social media posts or even a mistaken identity". It then endeavours, on behalf of its clients, to get any negative information removed."

"Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition shows that these watermarks can be reliably detected and undetectably erased by software."

"At the same time, the internet is constantly disappearing. It's a world of broken links and missing files-often because the people in charge cast things off on a whim. In 2019, MySpace lost 50 million music files and apologized for "the inconvenience." Around the same time, Flickr started deleting photos at random. Even though many of Vine's most unnerving or charming or "iconic" six-second videos have been preserved, its community was shattered when the platform was shut down. It doesn't help that the internet has no attention span and no loyalty: What isn't erased or deleted can still be quickly forgotten, buried under a pile of new platforms, new subcultures, and new joke formats. The feed refreshes, and so does the entire topography of the web."

"But users began to spot flaws in the feature over the weekend. The first to highlight the issue was PhD student Colin Madland, who discovered the issue while highlighting a different racial bias in the video-conference software Zoom. When Madland, who is white, posted an image of himself and a black colleague who had been erased from a Zoom call after its algorithm failed to recognise his face, Twitter automatically cropped the image to only show Madland."

"The flaw, dubbed "Log4Shell", may be the worst computer vulnerability discovered in years. It was uncovered in an open-source logging tool that is ubiquitous in cloud servers and enterprise software used across the industry and the government. Unless it is fixed, it grants criminals, spies and programming novices alike, easy access to internal networks where they can loot valuable data, plant malware, erase crucial information and much more."

"The Italian supreme court ordered prosecutors last month to disclose how the Sky ECC data had been retrieved, arguing that it was impossible to have a fair trial if the accused is unable to access the evidence or assess its reliability and legality, a position supposed by the NGO Fair Trials. Whether prosecutors choose to do so could determine whether the arrests made this week lead to convictions or not. Prosecutors in the UK face a similar dilemma in relation to the hacking of EncroChat, another secret messaging platform that had the added facility of a "panic" button that when pressed would immediately erase the phone's contents."

"No matter how much our computers assure us they're backing everything up to a hard drive in the sky, memory failure remains a hardwired part of our lives. Writers reflect on when a digital loss created an emotional hole - from the college essay that disappeared minutes before the due date to an iPhone update that lost years of photographs."

"But it also raises uncomfortable questions: is AI technology helping marginalized people overcome bias, or just perpetuating the biases that make their lives hard in the first place?"