Group items tagged

"A Microsoft programme to transcribe and vet audio from Skype and Cortana, its voice assistant, ran for years with "no security measures", according to a former contractor who says he reviewed thousands of potentially sensitive recordings on his personal laptop from his home in Beijing over the two years he worked for the company."

"The blackouts coincided with exams for secondary and high-school students and were implemented as the ultimate step in the country's battle to stop students cheating using smuggled mobile phones and internet-connected devices in exam halls. While attempting to ban mobile phones from exams or setting up local jamming equipment might be a less draconian measure, shutting off the internet is undoubtedly efficient. However, the outage impacted every person and business in the parts of the country controlled by the Iraqi government, causing human rights campaigners, including Access Now, to condemn the move."

"The graphene temporary tattoo seen here is the thinnest epidermal electronic device ever and according to the University of Texas at Austin researchers who developed it, the device can take some medical measurements as accurately as bulky wearable sensors like EKG monitors."

"The app then measures 14 health parameters (Glucose, Protein, Urobilinogen, Calcium, Blood, Creatinine, pH, Ketone, Bilirubin, Specific Gravity, Nitrites, Leucocyte, Ascorbic Acid, Microalbumin) using routine urine analysis, provides day-to-day analytics, and, importantly, enables regular monitoring for early warning markers for more than 25 medical conditions, including complications of diabetes, pregnancy, kidney disease, and urinary tract infections. The whole idea is to spot risks early, and to address big problems before they become too big. This is important both for the home user, as well for the beneficiary of the low-cost clinic in the developing world. "

"Copyright and Creation, a policy brief from a collection of respected scholars at the rock-ribbed London School of Economics, argues that the evidence shows that piracy isn't causing any grave harm to the entertainment industry, and that anti-piracy measures like the three-strikes provision in Britain's Digital Economy Act don't work. They call on lawmakers to take an evidence-led approach to Internet and copyright law, and to consider the interests of the public and not just big entertainment companies looking for legal backstops to their profit-maximisation strategies. "

"The reason is that routine big-data analytical techniques can now effectively manufacture personal data that is not protected by any of the measures we've used up to now. A well-known illustration of this is the way Target, an American retail chain, creatively collated scattered pieces of data about individuals' changes in shopping habits to predict the delivery date of pregnant shoppers - so that they could then be targeted with relevant advertisements."

Technology impacts on education From the abacus to the Apple Mac, technology has constantly changed the way we learn.In equal measure, the needs of education have provided the driving force behind some of our most significant technological innovations.BBC World Service programme Digital Planet, explored three of the many unique initiatives in education technology.

"Durumeric leads a team of researchers at the University of Michigan that has developed scanning software called ZMap. This tool can probe the whole public Internet in under an hour, revealing information about the roughly four billion devices online. The scan results can show which sites are vulnerable to particular security flaws. In the case of FREAK, a scan was used to measure the scale of the threat before the bug was publicly announced."

"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."

How long before this is used without our knowledge in facial recognition systems? "Through the use of the data from this lab study and a formula Kim and Yang applied called "fractal dimension," Kim and Yang discovered a negative relationship between the fractal dimension of pupil dilation and a person's workload, showing that pupil dilation could be used to indicate the mental workload of a person in a multitasking environment."

"Instead password strength meters measure entropy - the amount of time or energy needed to crack a password using brute force methods. The longer and more complex the password, the longer it will take to crack by simply iterating through a list of all possible passwords. According to Stockley, however, brute force is a password cracker's last resort."

"There's a technology that could be really useful in providing a real-time measure of the effectiveness (or otherwise) of public policy. But it's so intrusive that in "normal" times we would be very hesitant to adopt it. Present times are not normal, though, so we will probably adopt it - perhaps sensibly - "just for the duration of the crisis". And then?"

"Computers once performed facial recognition rather imprecisely, by identifying people's facial features and measuring the distances among them - a crude method that did not reliably result in matches. But recently, the technology has improved significantly, because of advances in artificial intelligence. A.I. software can analyze countless photos of people's faces and learn to make impressive predictions about which images are of the same person; the more faces it inspects, the better it gets. Clearview is deploying this approach using billions of photos from the public internet. By testing legal and ethical limits around the collection and use of those images, it has become the front-runner in the field. "

" "The longer one spends on email in [a given] hour the higher is one's stress for that hour," the authors noted. In another study, researchers placed thermal cameras below each subject's computer monitor, allowing them to measure the tell-tale "heat blooms" on a person's face that indicate psychological distress. "

"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."

"A study last year of 3.1 million workers in North America, Europe and the Middle East found "significant and durable increases" in both the average number of emails sent internally, and the number of recipients. By measuring the time between the first and last emails sent (or meetings attended) in a 24-hour period, the researchers concluded that, since the pandemic, the average workday had extended by 48.5 minutes."

"This is the so-called "privacy paradox", and the question is, what is needed to trigger an appropriate shift in regulation and public behaviour. What would it take for governments to take coherent, effective measures to stop the ruthless exploitation of personal data by surveillance capitalists?"

"n the never-ending calls for Twitter to better police its platform, the words of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer from 170 years ago remain relevant: "Every article, even in a newspaper, should be accompanied by the name of its author… so that when a man publicly proclaims through the far-sounding trumpet of the newspaper, he should be answerable for it, at any rate with his honour, if he has any; and if he has none, let his name neutralise the effect of his words… the result of such a measure would be to put an end to two-thirds of the newspaper lies, and to restrain the audacity of many a poisonous tongue.""

"The software, 4 Little Trees, was created by Hong Kong-based startup Find Solution AI. While the use of emotion recognition AI in schools and other settings has caused concern, founder Viola Lam says it can make the virtual classroom as good as - or better than - the real thing. Students work on tests and homework on the platform as part of the school curriculum. While they study, the AI measures muscle points on their faces via the camera on their computer or tablet, and identifies emotions including happiness, sadness, anger, surprise and fear. "