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"The Singapore government says the wearable device it is developing for COVID-19 contact tracing will not have GPS, internet, or cellular connectivity, so data it collects can only be extracted when it is physically handed over to a health official. These details are being offered up as the government looks to ease concerns about data privacy and drive the adoption of digital tools that can help speed up contact tracing. "

"On the other hand, users (as distinct from developers) are about to see an upside of Apple's monopoly power. The next update of its mobile operating system, iOS14, includes a change that should have a dire impact on many online advertisers. The industry assigns a unique code to each device called an IDFA. Knowing your IDFA can help advertisers tell whether their ads are effective, particularly when they've shown you the same ad in multiple places. Facebook uses the IDFA as part of Audience Network, its ad network for developers."

"It has been formed as a reaction to attempts by major tech platforms to clamp down on coronavirus disinformation - but the same tech outlets also help enable its reach: the Light's distribution relies on a 5,000-strong private Facebook group where volunteers offer to hand out copies and post them through their neighbours' doors."

"If anything, I think in the 50s and 60s - because so few people had direct experience of computers - there was even more concern than there is now. Computers were associated with vast power. It was only with the arrival in the 1980s and 1990s of the personal computer we were sold the idea that the technology was participatory and liberal. I think we have returned, in a way, to the original fears, now we sense that these personal devices very much represent the power of vast corporations. "

"The system is called as"Intelligent Classroom Behavior Management System" and it is being used at Hangzhou No. 11 High School. With scanning facial expressions the system has the ability to even analysis six types of behaviors by the students such as standing up, reading, writing, hand raising, listening to the teacher, and leaning on the desk."

"According to a report by Sophos, malware and spam are on the rise on social networks such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. In the last year, 57% of users report they have been spammed via social networking sites, an increase of 70.6% compared to last year. Furthermore, 36% of users claim they've been sent malware via social networking sites, which is a rise of 69.8% from last year. On the other hand, CEOs of companies are concerned that their employees' usage of social networks is posing a security risk for their company. Sophos has surveyed more than 500 organizations, discovering that 72% of them think social networks are a danger for their companys, with 60% of them tagging Facebook as the biggest security risk, followed by MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, says that Facebook is the biggest threat because it's the biggest social network out there, but he also places some of the blame on Facebook's own privacy rules. "When Facebook rolled-out its new recommended privacy settings late last year, it was a backwards step, encouraging many users to share their information with everybody on the internet," he says. Interestingly enough (and contrasted to some of the reports we've seen lately), Cluley thinks that simply barring access to Facebook is not the solution. "Social networks can be an essential part of the business mix today," he says, "and the answer is not to bar staff from participating in them but to apply some 'social security' instead.""

"BEIJING: Handing over a piping hot meal at exactly the time promised, Chinese food delivery driver Zhuang Zhenhua triumphantly tapped his job as complete through the Meituan app -- and was immediately fined half of his earnings. A glitch meant it inaccurately registered him as being late and he incurred an automatic penalty -- one of many ways, he said, delivery firms exploit millions of workers even as the sector booms. Authorities have launched a crackdown demanding firms including Meituan and Alibaba's Ele.me ensure basic labour protections such as proper compensation, insurance, as well as tackling algorithms that effectively encourage dangerous driving."

"The slightly misleading name for this resource is "personal data." Whether handed over intentionally or unwittingly, it captured by social media, cookies, and the internet of things captures, second-by-second now, granular details of behavior, temperament, and even thinking. It is an enormously valuable asset because it can be used to draw inferences not just about the expected future behavior of the producing subject."

"That ties their hands in how they can treat content related to the killings, they say, and forces them to leave up some content they believe ought to be removed. "It's been a month since the massacre and mass graves in Bucha, but this event hasn't been even designated a 'violating event', let alone a hate crime," said one moderator, who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity. "On that same day there was a shooting in the US, with one fatality and two casualties, and this was declared a violating event within three hours.""

"But it is also revealing of a tech culture that venerates profit above social usefulness - and which takes as implicit its right to innovate without limits, despite the consequences. AI that can find its own route to wealth is likely to displace jobs, change the nature of commerce, funnel power into the hands of the few and spread unrest among the many."

"The campaign's most organized form involves a database set up by anonymous activists that lists targets in the military, their photos, their locations, and how they have offended. Offenders are ranked by "traitor level," from "elite" to "low." Individuals have also taken social punishment into their own hands by creating Facebook groups and viral posts that share the identities of military family members or supporters. For the anti-coup population living abroad, the main objective is to get generals' family members living outside the country deported and their assets frozen. Within Myanmar, the goal is social and economic pressure, with boycotts on businesses and brands, and hopes that social shaming will convince military affiliates to work against their families and support the Civil Disobedience Movement."

"The Digital Services Act marks the end of the platforms' vast liability exemptions and their seeming impunity. It will impose more transparency on the platforms' content moderation and set rules on so-called dark patterns, design features that can trick users into doing things they didn't mean to."

"Ring recently revealed how often the answer to that question has been yes. The Amazon company responded to an inquiry from US Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.), confirming that there have been 11 cases in 2022 where Ring complied with police "emergency" requests. In each case, Ring handed over private recordings, including video and audio, without letting users know that police had access to-and potentially downloaded-their data. This raises many concerns about increased police reliance on private surveillance, a practice that's long gone unregulated."

"The use for humans in the world of robotics, even as teachers, is shrinking thanks to AI. NVIDIA Research has announced the creation of Eureka, an AI agent powered by GPT-4 that has trained robots to perform tasks using reward algorithms. Notably, Eureka taught a robotic hand to do pen spinning tricks as well as a human can (honestly, as you can see in the YouTube video below, better than many of us)."

"While the name behind the attack might be relatively new, the criminal technique is not. Ransomware gangs render an organisation's computers inaccessible by infecting them with malicious software - malware - and then demanding a payment, typically in cryptocurrency, to unlock the files. In recent years, however, in a process dubbed "double extortion", the majority of gangs steal data at the same time and threaten to release it online, which they hope will strengthen their negotiating hand."

Just because you find your data boring yourself, this does not have to be true for everyone else. Data is worth a lot in the right hands and nothing in the wrong ones. Money is worth the same to everyone, data varies in value depending on whether the person who has it is able to merge, match, cluster, compare it.

"What is in doubt is who will benefit from the boost to productivity. What if all the gains are seized by a handful of tech giants? What if history fails to repeat itself, and AI destroys more jobs than it creates? What if AI does lead to a net increase in employment, but the new jobs are less well-paid than the old ones? Put simply, what if it is different this time? That may well be the case. Much of the debate around the impact of AI is based on conjecture. There have been studies galore that have sought to estimate the number of jobs that will be affected - potentially running into the hundreds of millions globally - but nobody knows for sure. That said, certain conclusions can be drawn with a reasonable degree of confidence."

"Peter Chen, CEO of the robot software company Covariant, sits in front of a chatbot interface resembling the one used to communicate with ChatGPT. "Show me the tote in front of you," he types. In reply, a video feed appears, revealing a robot arm over a bin containing various items-a pair of socks, a tube of chips, and an apple among them. The chatbot can discuss the items it sees-but also manipulate them. When WIRED suggests Chen ask it to grab a piece of fruit, the arm reaches down, gently grasps the apple, and then moves it to another bin nearby."

"That is, in a way, Orion's most powerful and dangerous feature: they're so normal that people will want to wear them; they're so normal that people won't notice them. On the other hand, Meta has created a new gadget that, like every other before, can be enhanced or modified for other purposes, for better or worse. Should Meta stop building tech because a small number of people will use it for evil? If they had served this use case on a silver platter then yes, they should be held accountable. They didn't. Sure, Zuck's no friend, but he's not the one sneaking into your privacy."

"But historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our lives in the early 21st Century. That's because of a potentially history-deleting combination of how we live our lives digitally - and a paucity of official efforts to archive the world's information as it's produced these days. However, an informal group of organisations are pushing back against the forces of digital entropy - many of them operated by volunteers with little institutional support. None is more synonymous with the fight to save the web than the Internet Archive, an American non-profit based in San Francisco, started in 1996 as a passion project by internet pioneer Brewster Kahl. The organisation has embarked what may be the most ambitious digital archiving project of all time, gathering 866 billion web pages, 44 million books, 10.6 million videos of films and television programmes and more. Housed in a handful of data centres scattered across the world, the collections of the Internet Archive and a few similar groups are the only things standing in the way of digital oblivion."