Group items tagged

"A dump called "Collection #1" has been released by parties unknown, containing email addresses and cracked passwords: in its raw form, it contains 2.7 billion records, which Troy "Have I Been Pwned" Hunt (previously) de-duplicated to come up with 773 million unique records -- of those 140,000,000 email addresses and 10,000,000 passwords have never been seen in the HaveIBeenPwned database before."

"Tech workers are in demand: companies find it easier to raise cash than to hire engineers; this gives workers enormous bargaining power, and they're using it. From the Google uprisings over a Pentagon babykiller project and a Chinese surveillance project to the Microsoft uprising over ICE contracts, tech workers are emerging as part of the solution -- while their secretive, shareholder-haunted bosses are more and more the problem."

"I can't believe this has to be said (again), but cyberpunk was meant as a warning, not a business plan. It turns out that you need very few identifiers to make a guess about who a person standing in front of a billboard is, especially when you can suck data out of their phones. Throw in data about how long you stand in front of a billboard and you've got metrics that advertisers can use to tune their campaigns."

"Many services retain the data they harvest indefinitely, and some have been caught storing (and losing) the data without encryption: for example, in 2017 the Greater Manchester Police were found to have lost data from victims of violent and sexual crimes, which had been stored unencrypted on DVDs and sent through the post."

"Algorithms steer us back to similar content in echo chambers that inhibit both critical and creative thinking. Platforms incentivized to keep users scrolling discourage long-looking and render users as passive consumers, rather than active seekers of inspiration. They aren't a space for productive feedback, either: Art takes on a different tone when it's surrounded by dog GIFs, political memes, and your cousin's baby photos."

"They found that despite the 40% "ad-tech" premium charged by behavioral ad companies, the ads only added about 4% the media companies that published them, meaning that behavioral advertising is a losing proposition. "

"which binds over all tech companies to serve as "data fiduciaries," with a legal requirement to use your data in ways that benefit you -- and not ways that benefit themselves at your expense (lawyers, doctors and other professionals have similar fiduciary duties); specifically, companies must not use your data in ways that would be "unexpected and highly offensive to a reasonable consumer.""

"In 1998, the US Congress retroactively extended the copyright on US works, placing public domain works back into copyright and forestalling the entry into the public domain of a great mass of works that were soon to become public domain; now, 20 years later with no copyright term extension in sight, the US public domain is about to receive the first of many annual infusions to come, a great mass of works that will be free for all to use. "

"Already, artificially intelligent software can evolve false political and social constructs highly targeted to sway specific audiences. Users find themselves in highly individualized, algorithmically determined news and information feeds, intentionally designed to: isolate them from conflicting evidence or opinions, create self-reinforcing feedback loops of confirmation, and untether them from fact-based reality. And these are just early days. If memes and disinformation have been weaponized on social media, it is still in the musket stage."

"If mediocre malware can power some of the largest DDoS attacks ever, and considering the sad state of security of the Internet of Things in general, we should probably brace for more cyberattacks powered by our easy-to-hack "smart" Internet of Things, as many, including ourselves, had predicted months ago."

"In Neural Photo Editing With Introspective Adversarial Networks, a group of University of Edinburgh engineers and a private research colleague describe a method for using "introspective adversarial networks" to edit images in realtime, which they demonstrate in an open project called "Neural Photo Editor" that "enhances" photos by predicting what should be under your brush."

"Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition shows that these watermarks can be reliably detected and undetectably erased by software."

"brings a fully robotic weaponry system to an airborne platform. TIKAD, "

"The Open AI researchers were intrigued by a claim that self-driving cars would be intrinsically hard to fool (tricking them into sudden braking maneuvers, say), because "they capture images from multiple scales, angles, perspectives, and the like.""

"The triumph of open standards has manifestly demoralized Chiariglione, who grudgingly admits that a combination of rent-seeking by MPEG members and legal threats from patent trolls has spelled the end of the "business model" of creating standards for the purpose of allowing companies to charge royalties for everyday technological activities by injecting their patents into it."

"The revelation that encrypted email is vulnerable to a variety of devastating attacks (collectively known as "Efail") has set off a round of soul-searching by internet security researchers and other technical people -- can we save email? One way to think about Efail is that it was caused by a lack of central coordination and control over email-reading programs -- the underlying protocols are strong and robust, but they can be implemented in ways that create real problems. In particular, the ability to show HTML inside a message makes email very hard to secure:"

"Flooding involves deluging the citizen with a torrent of information - some accurate, some phoney, some biased - with the aim of making people overwhelmed. In a digital world, flooding is child's play: it's cheap, effective and won't generate backlash. (En passant, it's what Russia - and Trump - do.) In her book, Roberts provides abundant evidence of how the Chinese authorities deploy these three techniques."