Group items tagged

"When Vancouver tech retailer NCIX went bankrupt, it stopped paying its bills, including the bills for the storage where its servers were being kept; that led to the servers being auctioned off without being wiped first, containing sensitive data -- addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, passwords, etc -- for thousands of customers. Also on the servers: tax and payroll information for the company's employees."

"is an experimental service from Carnegie Mellon University that stores images of old processors, as well as the old operating systems that ran on top of them, along with software packages for those old OSes; this allows users to access old data from obsolete systems inside simulations of the computers that originally ran that data, using the original operating systems and applications."

"EFF's Legal Director Corynne McSherry offers five lessons to keep in mind: 1. (Lots of) mistakes will be made: copyright takedowns result in the removal of tons of legitimate content. 2. Robots won't help: automated filtering tools like Content ID have been a disaster, and policing copyright with algorithms is a lot easier than policing "bad speech." 3. These systems need to be transparent and have due process. A system that allows for automated instant censorship and slow, manual review of censorship gives a huge advantage to people who want to abuse the system. 4. Punish abuse. The ability to censor other peoples' speech is no joke. If you're careless or malicious in your takedown requests, you should pay a consequence: maybe a fine, maybe being barred form using the takedown system. 5. Voluntary moderation quickly becomes mandatory. Every voluntary effort to stem copyright infringement has been followed by calls to make those efforts mandatory (and expand them)."

"FOLLOW US Twitter / Facebook / RSS Machine learning image classifiers use context clues to help understand the contents of a room, for example, if they manage to identify a dining-room table with a high degree of confidence, that can help resolve ambiguity about other objects nearby, identifying them as chairs. The downside of this powerful approach is that it means machine learning classifiers can be confounded by confusing, out-of-context elements in a scene, as is demonstrated in The Elephant in the Room, a paper from a trio of Toronto-based computer science academics."

"Jack Poulson was a senior research scientist at Google whose work on machine learning work was used to improve Google's search results; now he's quit the company over its Project Dragonfly, a once-secret plan to launch a censored Chinese search engine; Poulson called the move a "forfeiture of our values." Tech companies find it hard to qualify skilled engineers at any price, and machine learning specialists are especially prize, commanding salaries of $1MM/year or more. "

"In a world of cloud computing, everything we do is governed by tens of thousands of words of legal fine-print (including the fine print that warned Mr da Silva that his movies might stop working if he changed the region associated with his Itunes account) that no one (including Mr da Silva, and you, and me) has ever, ever read (famously so!)."

""AI can pick up missed cues and suggest nudges to bridge the gap in emotional intelligence and communication styles. It can identify optimal ways to discuss common problems and alleviate common misunderstandings based on these different priorities and ways of viewing the world. We could be looking at a different gender dynamics in a decade.""

"Teslas are incredibly data-hungry, storing massive troves of data about their owners, including videos of crashes, location history, contacts and calendar entries from paired phones, photos of the driver and passengers taken with interior cameras, and other data; this data is stored without encryption, and it is not always clear when Teslas are gathering data, and the only way to comprehensively switch off data-gathering also de-activates over-the-air software updates for the cars, "

"Facebook is keeping true to its "be terrible" motto by paying The Daily Telegraph to run a series of sponsored articles praising Facebook."

"publicly announced that the company had "overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles" and that the vehicles, when they did arrive, their "applications will be narrow, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is so complex.""

GREAT website with lots of debate re Privacy issues...

"Based on data from over 17,000 teenagers, the study "casts doubt on the widely accepted notion that spending time online, gaming or watching TV, especially before bedtime, can damage young people's mental health.""

"L&M used a credential stuffing attack: using email addresses gleaned from massive breaches to gain access by repeatedly trying different email/password combinations."

"showing how they can create a 40cm x 40cm "patch" that fools a convoluted neural network classifier that is otherwise a good tool for identifying humans into thinking that a person is not a person -- something that could be used to defeat AI-based security camera systems. They theorize that the could just print the patch on a t-shirt and get the same result."

"The listeners accurately heard the sentences 43 percent of the time when given a set of 25 possible words to choose from, and 21 percent of the time when given 50 words, the study found."

"Imagine a world where an authoritarian government monitors everything you do, amasses huge amounts of data on almost every interaction you make, and awards you a single score that measures how "trustworthy" you are."

"learning to play a musical instrument, you have to play the same songs and scales over and over again. YouTube's algorithm doesn't seem to know this, and so it demonetized a piano tutorial channel for "Repetitious content.""

"Of all the disturbing parts of this @CaseyNewton piece about Facebook content reviewers -- and there are many -- the one about people slowly coming to believe the conspiracy theories sticks with me https://t.co/ulDx3PEaWa"