Group items tagged

"Google and Mozilla are making changes to their respective web browsers to try and thwart the notoriously corrupt government of Kazakhstan's efforts to launch a surveillance operation against its own citizens."

"Encryption is the digital lock which gives us the security to trust our financial data and inner-most thoughts to the cloud, and without which everything, and I mean everything, in our digital lives might be exposed. "

"For example, I've been repeatedly emailed by company spokespeople to tell me that cops only get access to Ring customers' videos if the customers offer to share it; but what they never said is that if a customer turns down a police request, Amazon instructs the cops to make an "official request" to the company and then they grant warrantless access to the footage. "

"My latest Locus Magazine column is DRM Broke Its Promise, which recalls the days when digital rights management was pitched to us as a way to enable exciting new markets where we'd all save big by only buying the rights we needed (like the low-cost right to read a book for an hour-long plane ride), but instead (unsurprisingly) everything got more expensive and less capable. "

"Twitter sent a letter this week to the small start-up company, Clearview AI, demanding that it stop taking photos and any other data from the social media website "for any reason" and delete any data that it previously collected, a Twitter spokeswoman said. "

"There are three big challenges in the Internet space that all countries must face in the near future. China's approach to the challenges will impact not only Chinese Internet users, but potentially all Internet users. What interface follows the smart hone, whether it be AR-enabled glasses, foldable screens, or wearable projectors, will not only be influenced by China's substantial Internet-using population, but also by their manufacturing. Privacy, as it relates to online information collecting and sale, has consequences for broader community standards, and there is no one-size fits all approach to this issue. China must engage their own ethicists, community, government and technologists to develop a solution that works for China. Finally, globalization. Most of China's internet success has been within China, but as China begins to consider how it might attract users from outside its borders, it will need to consider dialing back the protections that have held foreign Internet companies at bay."

"Clearview, the shady facial-recognition firm with links to law-enforcement and alt-right internet trolls, reports that its entire client list has been stolen."

"Investors and clients of the facial recognition start-up with ties to the extreme right used an early version of the Clearview AI app on dates and at parties - "and to spy on the public.""

"I tried to start Adobe Acrobat today, part of the Creative Cloud suite, and it wouldn't start unless I agreed to new Terms of Use. But to read the Terms of Use, I had to agree to the Terms of Use first. This video shows me haplessly clicking the "Terms of Use" link only to be prevented from reading them because, of course, I had not agreed to the Terms of Use"

"Gmail users are under attack in a gigantic phishing operation that's spreading like wildfire across the internet right now. People took to Twitter to report receiving an email that looks like an invitation to join a Google Doc from someone they know. But when you click on the link to open the file, you are directed to grant access to an app that looks like Google Docs but is actually a program that sends spam emails to everyone you've emailed, according to a detailed outline of the attack on Reddit. "

" respite was thanks to a sloppy bit of programming from the worm's creator, who'd left a killswitch in the code: newly infected systems checked to see if a certain domain (iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com) existed before attempting to spread the infection; by registering this domain, security researchers were able to freeze the worm.The respite was thanks to a sloppy bit of programming from the worm's creator, who'd left a killswitch in the code: newly infected systems checked to see if a certain domain (iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com) existed before attempting to spread the infection; by registering this domain, security researchers were able to freeze the worm. But a day later, it's back, and this time, without the killswitch. Security researchers running honeypots have seen new infections by versions of the worm that can spread even when the iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com domain is live."

"Now, in a new report published yesterday by researchers from the Bangalore-based think-tank the Centre for Internet and Society, Amber Sinha and Srinivas Kodali comprehensively document the many ways in which Aadhaar is leaking, tracking the #aadhaarleaks hashtag, which has revealed potentially compromising information on more than 130,000,000 people, largely material that is intentionally available through official portals."

" "Why isn't my face being detected? We have to look at how we give machines sight," she said in a TED Talk late last year. "Computer vision uses machine-learning techniques to do facial recognition. You create a training set with examples of faces. However, if the training sets aren't really that diverse, any face that deviates too much from the established norm will be harder to detect.""

"Chinese delivery firm is moving to embrace automation.Chinese delivery firm is moving to embrace automation. Orange robots at the company's sorting stations are able to identify the destination of a package through a code-scan, virtually eliminating sorting mistakes. Shentong's army of robots can sort up to 200,000 packages a day, and are self-charging, meaning they are operational 24/7."

"Worse: turbines are networked, so once one turbine is compromised, the rest of the turbines in the field can be poisoned, with attacks that include "paralyzing turbines, suddenly triggering their brakes to potentially damage them, and even relaying false feedback to their operators to prevent the sabotage from being detected.""

"GPT-3 medical chatbot tells suicidal test patient to kill themselves"