Group items tagged

"Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is a model for traffic without ownership. You pay a monthly fee for it, like with Spotify, tell the app where you are going and get instant access to taxis, Ubers, buses, and so on. Everything is available on-demand and ownership is no longer needed."

"This week, Atlassian's . This follows the trend of more and more high-profile hacks that are waking consumers up - like , , and the that rocked the country when 40 million debit and credit card numbers stolen during the holiday shopping time that year. (See of all the hacks from 2004 - present.)"

"That's the crux of the problem. While you can legislate to only give state agencies access to terrorists' communications, and with proper oversight and authorisation, you cannot actually build encryption that works like that. If you put a backdoor in, it's there not just for security services to exploit, but for cyber-criminals, oppressive regimes and anyone else."

"Yet these blueprints may also alarm free speech advocates concerned about Facebook's de facto role as the world's largest censor. Both sides are likely to demand greater transparency."

"Indeed, this scam is far subtler. It works like this: fraudsters are able to register domains with characters plucked from various alphabets other than the default Latin script. When displayed, it's all but impossible to tell apart a Greek "O" from a Cyrillic "O" from a Latin "O," for instance."

"The results may seem similar to what you'd get if you'd searched WebMD, Mayo Clinic, etc. The difference is that Dr. A.I. pulls in many more data points than those sites do, then combines artificial intelligence with a massive database to pinpoint the most likely results in your specific case. It doesn't just find all possible ailments and list them for you to explore further on your own."

"The Chinese government is planning on implementing a system that connects citizens' financial, social, political, and legal credit ratings into one big social trustability score. The idea would be that if someone breaks trust in one area, they'd be adversely affected everywhere."

"Researchers from MIT and Google recently showed off a machine learning algorithm capable of automatically retouching photos just like a professional photographer. Snap a photo and the neural network identifies exactly how to make it look better-increase contrast a smidge, tone down brightness, whatever-and apply the changes in less than 20 milliseconds."

"Google, Uber, Tesla and the major truck manufacturers are looking to a future in which people like Baxter will be replaced - or at the very least downgraded to co-pilots - by automated vehicles that will save billions but will cost millions of jobs. It will be one of the biggest changes to the jobs market since the invention of the automated loom - challenging the livelihoods of millions across the world."

"But the answer to how he was chosen is actually an algorithm, a computer program that crunched through reams of data, looking at how much each passenger had paid for their ticket, what time they checked in, how often they flew on United, and whether they were part of a rewards program. The algorithm likely determined that Dr. Dao was one of the least valuable customers on the flight at the time."

"On paper, making human beings behave like simple machines might deliver greater efficiency. But modern-day Taylorism threatens something that those kinds of market analyses fail to capture: the value of being human."

"Once the image was in my Ethereum wallet, I didn't particularly feel like I owned it any more than the other screenshots in my Images file. But I did feel a nihilistic rush - the thrill of abstract money moving around."

"More than two-thirds (68.7%) of the addicts had trouble sleeping, compared with 57.1% of those who were not addicted to their device. Students who used their phone after midnight or for four or more hours a day were most likely to be at high risk of displaying addictive use of their device."

"But it wasn't just one day of high engagement. A new study from Cybersecurity For Democracy found that far-right accounts known for spreading misinformation are not only thriving on Facebook, they're actually more successful than other kinds of accounts at getting likes, shares and other forms of user engagement. It wasn't a small edge, either. "It's almost twice as much engagement per follower among the sources that have a reputation for spreading misinformation," Edelson said. "So, clearly, that portion of the news ecosystem is behaving very differently.""

"So when I discovered the pocket of Instagram where you can find out what it thinks you're interested in (on the app, you'll find it under Settings> Security> Access data > Ads), I obviously felt it my duty as a netizen to see what dark insights it had into my private soul. Here goes: jewellery; luxury goods; electronic music; love; emotions; fashion design; crafts. I mean: no offence, Kraftwerk (and loved ones) but I could not name eight things I am less interested in. Maybe oxbow lakes."

"When researchers looked at data measuring respondents' online behaviour, those with inflated perceptions of their abilities more frequently visited websites linked to the spread of false or misleading news. The overconfident participants were also less able to distinguish between true and false claims about current events and reported higher willingness to share false content, especially when it aligned with their political predispositions, the authors found."

"Beginning in 2017, I did a project with artist Trevor Paglen to look at how people were being labelled. We found horrifying classificatory terms that were misogynist, racist, ableist, and judgmental in the extreme. Pictures of people were being matched to words like kleptomaniac, alcoholic, bad person, closet queen, call girl, slut, drug addict and far more I cannot say here. ImageNet has now removed many of the obviously problematic people categories - certainly an improvement - however, the problem persists because these training sets still circulate on torrent sites [where files are shared between peers]."

"Over the Bridge hopes the project emphasizes exactly how much work goes into creating AI music. "There's an inordinate amount of human hands at the beginning, middle and end to create something like this," explained Michael Scriven, a rep for Lemmon Entertainment whose CEO is on Over the Bridge's board of directors. Scriven added, "A lot of people may think [AI] is going to replace musicians at some point, but at this point, the number of humans that are required just to get to a point where a song is listenable is actually quite significant.""

"Researchers fed these algorithms (which function like autocomplete, but for images) pictures of a man cropped below his neck: 43% of the time the image was autocompleted with the man wearing a suit. When you fed the same algorithm a similarly cropped photo of a woman, it auto-completed her wearing a low-cut top or bikini a massive 53% of the time. For some reason, the researchers gave the algorithm a picture of the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and found that it also automatically generated an image of her in a bikini. (After ethical concerns were raised on Twitter, the researchers had the computer-generated image of AOC in a swimsuit removed from the research paper.)"