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"Given everything the Pacific, and the world, have sacrificed this pandemic, a forum reduced to a virtual meeting is far from the greatest loss. But it is already having consequences, with threats from some countries to abandon the forum altogether because of a lack of consensus over who, now, will lead it."

"A giant database of intercepted Snapchat photos and videos has been released by hackers who have been collecting the files for years. Shocked users of the notorious chat forum 4chan are referring to the hack as "The Snappening," noting that this is far bigger than the iCloud hacks that recently targeted celebrities."

"The algorithmic manager seems to watch everything you do. Ride-hailing platforms track a variety of personalized statistics, including ride acceptance rates, cancellation rates, hours spent logged in to the app and trips completed. And they display selected statistics to individual drivers as motivating tools, like "You're in the top 10 percent of partners!" Uber uses the accelerometer in drivers' phones along with GPS and gyroscope to give them safe driving reports, tracking their performance in granular detail. One driver posted to a forum that a grade of 210 out of 247 "smooth accelerations" earned a "Great work!" from the boss."

"The Future of Jobs Report arrives as the rising tide of automation is expected to displace millions of American workers in the long term and as corporations, educational institutions and elected officials grapple with a global technological shift that may leave many people behind. The report, published Monday, envisions massive changes in the worldwide workforce as businesses expand the use of artificial intelligence and automation in their operations. Machines account for 29 percent of the total hours worked in major industries, compared with 71 percent performed by people. By 2022, however, the report predicts that 42 percent of task hours will be performed by machines and 58 percent by people"

"My personal coding projects have presented similarly thorny ethical questions. Should I write a computer program that will download the communications of thousands of teenagers suffering from eating disorders posted on an anorexia advice website? Write a program to post anonymous, suicidal messages on hundreds of college forums to see which colleges offer the most support? My answer to these questions, incidentally, was "no". But I considered it. And the glory and peril of computers is that they magnify the impact of your whims: an impulse becomes a program that can hurt thousands of people."

"Twitter has proved a cherished forum for climate scientists to share research, as well as for activists seeking to rally action to halt oil pipelines or decry politicians' failure to cut pollution. But many are now fleeing Twitter due to a surge in climate misinformation, spam and even threats that have upended their relationship with the platform."

"Word of the layoffs comes over a year after the company made a big hiring push, doubling its size to over 500 people. Stack Overflow did not elaborate on the reasons for the layoff, but its hiring push began near the start of a generative AI boom that has stuffed chatbots into every corner of the tech industry, including coding. That presents clear challenges for a personal coding help forum, as developers get comfortable with AI coding assistance and the very tools that do that are blended into products they use. AI-generated coding answers have also posed problems for the company over the past year. The company issued a temporary ban on users generating answers with the help of an AI chatbot in December last year, but its alleged under-enforcement led to a months-long strike among moderators that was resolved in August; the ban is still in place today. Stack Overflow also announced it would start charging AI companies to train on its site. "

"In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles-including some you really wouldn't want shared on the Internet. In one particularly revealing shot, a young woman in a lavender T-shirt sits on the toilet, her shorts pulled down to mid-thigh. The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot's Roomba J7 series robot vacuum. They were then sent to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers around the world to label audio, photo, and video data used to train artificial intelligence."

"A wave of artificial intelligence-driven misinformation and disinformation that could influence key looming elections poses the biggest short-term threat to the global economy, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has said. In a deeply gloomy assessment, the body that convenes its annual meeting in Davos next week expressed concern that politics could be disrupted by the spread of false information, potentially leading to riots, strikes and crackdowns on dissent from governments."

""Equal access does imply equal opportunities," says the report, which goes on to point out that while anyone can use the internet to learn about the world, improve their skills or apply for a well-paid job, disadvantaged students are less likely to be aware of the opportunities that digital technology offers. "They may not have the knowledge or skills required to turn online opportunities into real opportunities," the report says."

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.

"With all the information together, they created a prediction model which can guess with 80% accuracy whether or not that user will go on to be banned from just their first five posts. "

"If that data is collected, does the child have a right to get it back? If that data is collected from very early childhood and does not belong to the child, does it make the child extra vulnerable because his or her choices and patterns of behaviour could be known to anyone who purchases the data, for example, companies or political campaigns. Depending on the privacy laws of the state in which the toys are being used, if the data is collected and kept, it breaches Article 16 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child - the right to privacy. (Though, of course, arguably this is something parents routinely do by posting pictures of their children on Facebook). "

"As a society, we should care not just about how much innovation takes place, but also about the types of new technologies that are developed. We ought to ensure we are investing in technologies that are safe, environmentally sound, empower rather than simply replace human labor, and are consistent with democratic values and human rights."

"As a society, we should care not just about how much innovation takes place, but also about the types of new technologies that are developed. We ought to ensure we are investing in technologies that are safe, environmentally sound, empower rather than simply replace human labor, and are consistent with democratic values and human rights."

"The platforms that control search were conceived in sin. Their business model auctions off our most precious and limited cognitive resource: attention. These platforms work overtime to hijack our attention by purveying information that arouses curiosity, outrage, or anger. The more our eyeballs remain glued to the screen, the more ads they can show us, and the greater profits accrue to their shareholders."