Group items tagged

"Tufekci describes how insurgent, democratic movements were early arrivals to the internet, and how clumsy authoritarians' attempts to fight them by shutting the net down only energized their movements. But canny authoritarians mastered the platforms, figuring out how to game their automated algorithms to upvote their messages, and how to game their moderation policies to banish their adversaries."

""Ultimately, we need a global movement for the web like we now have for the environment, so that governments and companies are far more responsive to citizens than they are today. The contract lays the foundations for that movement.""

"The mind-reading robot - a PR2 personal robot designed by Willow Garage, equipped with a Microsoft Kinect 3D camera - does that by analyzing your body movements. It then searches through its database of various household activities and decides which action will likely follow. "

"Researchers at the University of California-Santa Barbara recently discovered a Waze vulnerability that allowed them to create thousands of "ghost drivers" that can monitor the drivers around them-an exploit that could be used to track Waze users in real-time. They proved it to me by tracking my own movements around San Francisco and Las Vegas over a three-day period."

"Five thousand bees will be fitted with the tiny 2.5 mm square RFID chips, which will allow the scientists to track their movements much like a toll tag on your car lets the roadway authority know when you drive past a certain point. Bees tend to fly in regular repeatable patterns, so any changes in their activity will be easy to spot. To tag the bees, they are placed in a refrigerator to make them immobile, then the tags are simply attached with adhesive. The researchers say that the tag has no effect on a bee's behavior, but how would you like to have a big square chip glued to the back of your neck?"

"The device tracks a single person with an accuracy of plus or minus 10 centimeters - about the size of an adult hand. Apart from the ability to "see" through a wall, its main advantage is that the person being tracked isn't required to wear a transmitter. While other location systems depend on Wi-Fi, this device can track a person's movements within the radius of its radio waves."

"While capable of mimicking others, the SociBot's slightly sinister side comes from the fact that it is also watching you. Equipped with two cameras in its head and a depth sensor in its chest, it can detect gestures and movements, as well as judge your emotions by mapping the position of your features over a series of internal templates."

Looks like Microsoft's Project Natal is more advanced than most of us thought. It effectively tracks bodily movements, even in low-light conditions.

"Researchers in China claimed to have developed a kit that can match faces with up to 99.15 percent accuracy"

"Many people unwittingly sign up to be location-tracked 24/7, unaware that the highly sensitive data this generates is being used and sold on for profit. Campaigners say that if this information were stolen by hackers, criminals could use it to target children as they leave school or homes after occupants have gone out."

"The Facebook data, which captured the engagement metrics on thousands of posts by the six major party leaders in the two months leading up to the election, was collected by academics at the University of Pisa's MediaLab. It reveals all of the 25 most shared Facebook posts in the two months leading up to the election were videos, live broadcasts or photos from either Salvini, who runs the far-right League, or Di Maio, the leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S)."

"The Wheelie 7 kit equips a wheelchair with artificial intelligence to detect the user's expressions and process the data in real-time to direct the movement of the chair. Smiling, raising the eyebrows, wrinkling the nose or puckering the lips as if for a kiss are among the repertoire of 10 gestures recognised by the prototype Wheelie 7."

"The company, Unacast, went live with its Social Distancing Scoreboard Tuesday. The dashboard, billed as a public health utility, includes a county-by-county breakdown of people's movement patterns. It assigns each county a grade, which Unacast based (at least in part) on how much people are traveling. "

"Lexplore claims its technology is new-particularly the algorithm that separates typical from atypical readers. But the concepts it's based on aren't. Its tech draws from a deep well of previously-conducted research stretching back decades, which is generally supportive of using a combination of eye tracking and machine learning to screen for dyslexia. "Eye movements is one of the best ways to index reading ability at an incredibly in-depth level," says Julie Kirkby, a psychology professor at Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom, who has studied eye tracking and dyslexia for years."

"It is the first time scientists have created sentences from brain activity linked to handwriting and paves the way for more sophisticated devices to help paralysed people communicate faster and more clearly. The man, known as T5, who is in his 60s and lost practically all movement below his neck after a spinal cord injury in 2007, was able to write 18 words a minute when connected to the system. On individual letters, his "mindwriting" was more than 94% accurate."

"German Green party MP, Malte Spitz, went a step further and published 6 months of records kept (at the time by law) by his phone company about him. To emphasise how scary it was privacy-wise he published it in the form of a minute by minute interactive map, so anyone could follow his exact location (just like the phone company) as though in real time from the location metadata his phone was giving away all the time. The metadata was combined with his freely available social networking data, allowing anyone to see not just where he was but often what he was doing. Germany no longer requires phone companies to keep this metadata, but other countries have antiterrorist laws that require similar information to be kept for everyone. You can explore Malte's movements at (archived link: www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention) to get an idea of how your life is being tracked by metadata."

"Anonymised Facebook data on people's travels could be used to identify the spread of Covid-19 in locations where health officials are not yet aware of it, a new Australian study has found. Published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface on Wednesday, University of Melbourne researchers analysed anonymised population mobility data provided by Facebook as part of its Data for Good program to determine whether it could be a useful predictor in determining the spread of Covid outbreaks based on where people were travelling."

"This kind of muddy uncertainty seemed inevitable. The board has jurisdiction over every Facebook user in the world, but intuitions about freedom of speech vary dramatically across political and cultural divides. In Hong Kong, where the pro-democracy movement has used social media to organize protests, activists rely on Facebook's free-expression principles for protection against the state. In Myanmar, where hate speech has contributed to a genocide against the Rohingya, advocates have begged for stricter enforcement. "