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"Why care? Because understanding manipulation is crucial in the current critical debate about digital technologies in moral philosophy and related disciplines."

"It is a stark contrast to how social media platforms have dealt with misinformation in the past."

"The conference acquired 30 machines for hackers to toy with. Every voting machine in the village was hacked. Though voting machines are technologically simple, they are difficult for researchers to obtain for independent research."

"We want to start a conversation about emotion recognition technology. Explore the site, watch the video, play a game and add your thoughts to our research. Or turn on your camera to activate our very own emotion recognition machine...will it 'emojify' you? "

" "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. "

"The researchers programmed a robot called Pepper, made by SoftBank Robotics, with the ability to vocalise its thought processes. This means the robot is no longer a "black box" and its underlying decision-making is more transparent to the user."

"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."

"El Salvador has become the first country in the world to adopt bitcoin as legal tender after its congress approved President Nayib Bukele's proposal to embrace the cryptocurrency in an effort to promote "financial inclusion", investment and economic development."

"It's hard to incentivise profit-driven companies to change their services according to specific needs while maintaining them free and accessible for all."

YES IAN YOU SHOULD BE READING THIS! "The authors raise three arguments: first, that "notice and choice" has been a failure ("to opt out simply stay indoors!"); second, that facial recognition fears are technophobic overreactions, and finally, that facial recognition is uniquely powerful and dangerous and needs a regulatory framework separate from other privacy rules ("to opt out, just don't have a face")."

"On inbuilt bias in algorithms, Sharkey said: "There are so many biases happening now, from job interviews to welfare to determining who should get bail and who should go to jail. It is quite clear that we really have to stop using decision algorithms, and I am someone who has always been very light on regulation and always believed that it stifles innovation."

"Hultquist noted that cyberwarfare evens the battlefield between Iran and the US. "That's why they choose an asymmetric battleground," he said. "We might have this massive advantage with a very sophisticated ability, but we also have this very sophisticated society that makes us very vulnerable to computer attacks.""

"A chat app that quickly became popular in the United Arab Emirates for communicating with friends and family is actually a spying tool used by the government to track its users, according to a New York Times report."

"Vivian Balakrishnan on why he had earlier said that TraceTogether app data would only be used for COVID-19 contact tracing. The Home Affairs Ministry has since said the data could be used for criminal investigations."

"Engineer who created Facebook 'like' button swears off social media apps"

"The gulf between how well facial recognition performs in academic settings vs. real world applications is vast."

"My job was to use technology to make the low-level content moderators' work more efficient. For example, we created a tool that allowed them to throw a video clip into our database and search for similar content. When I was at ByteDance, we received multiple requests from the bases to develop an algorithm that could automatically detect when a Douyin user spoke Uyghur, and then cut off the livestream session. The moderators had asked for this because they didn't understand the language. Streamers speaking ethnic languages and dialects that Mandarin-speakers don't understand would receive a warning to switch to Mandarin."

"Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. Emotional contagion is well established in laboratory experiments, with people transferring positive and negative emotions to others. Data from a large real-world social network, collected over a 20-y period suggests that longer-lasting moods (e.g., depression, happiness) can be transferred through networks [Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2008) BMJ 337:a2338], although the results are controversial. "