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"Some £200m has been spent by the public sector on the computer giant's Office suite alone since 2010. But the Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude believes a significant proportion of that outlay could be cut by switching to software which can produce open-source files in the "open document format" (ODF), such as OpenOffice and Google Docs."

"And some provinces are using some creepy Big Brother technology to do it. In Surat Thani, the province that contains the tourism hotspot islands of Koh Samui, Koh Phangan, and Koh Tao, the immigration office is employing new technology. Officers have equipped Smart Patrol Cars that is using advanced facial recognition to check foreigners quickly. Immigration officers are patrolling in WiFi-enabled cars, usually a BMW, to crack down on foreigners who have overstayed."

""Many bosses want everyone back in the office every day because they think that staff are most efficient when all in together," he says. "All this stuff Rees-Mogg and Boris [Johnson] are saying about people not really working properly unless they're in the office is disproved by the research.""

" A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company's chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police. The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday. "(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake," senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city's public broadcaster RTHK. Chan said the worker had grown suspicious after he received a message that was purportedly from the company's UK-based chief financial officer. Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked of the need for a secret transaction to be carried out. However, the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said."

"n many jobs, work email doesn't stop when the employee leaves the office. And now France has decided to act. It has introduced rules to protect about a million people working in the digital and consultancy sectors from work email outside office hours. Those are taken to be before 9am and after 6pm. The deal signed between employers federations and unions says that employees will have to switch off work phones and avoid looking at work email, while firms cannot pressure staff to check messages. "

"That was apparently the result of the US government's probing of visa applicants' social media profiles. After the search, an officer questioned the 17-year-old, who got a scholarship to study in the US, about his friends' social media activity and told him she'd found some "posting political points of view that oppose the US," the student paper noted. Despite Ajjawi's protests, the officer denied the student's entry and let him call his parents."

"Humming does not sit easily with the way we imagine technology, but it highlights a crucial truth about how humans navigate the world of work, in offices, online or anywhere else: even if we think we are rational, logical creatures, we make decisions in social groups by absorbing a wide range of signals. And perhaps the best way to understand this is to employ an idea popularised by anthropologists working at companies such as Xerox during the late 20th century, and since used by Beunza and others on Wall Street: "Sense-making"."

"Home Office officials have drawn up secret plans to lobby the independent privacy regulator in an attempt to push the rollout of controversial facial recognition technology into high street shops and supermarkets, internal government minutes seen by the Observer reveal."

"Team Trump shares video of Ron DeSantis deepfaked into the "Michael Scott wearing a women's suit" scene from The Office"

"The U-turn came after the majority of members on the 11-person board had voted last week to allow robots to be armed with explosives and use them to kill people "when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available to SFPD". The board had also added an amendment saying that only high-ranking officers would be allowed to authorize deadly force."

"The January snow lay thick on the Moscow ground, as masked officers of the FSB - Russia's fearsome security agency - prepared to smash down the doors at one of 25 addresses they would raid that day. Their target was REvil, a shadowy conclave of hackers that claimed to have stolen more than $100m (£74m) a year through "ransomware" attacks, before suddenly disappearing. As group members were led away in cuffs, FSB officers gathered crypto-wallets containing untold volumes of digital currency such as bitcoin. Others used money-counting machines to tot up dozens of stacks of hundred dollar bills."

"On Mar 16, 2023, The Copyright Office initiated an effort to investigate copyright law and policy concerns related to Generative AI. "This initiative is in direct response to the recent striking advances in generative AI technologies and their rapidly growing use by individuals and businesses. The Copyright Office has received requests from Congress and members of the public, including creators and AI users, to examine the issues raised for copyright, and it is already receiving applications for registration of works including AI-generated content.""

"In September last year, researchers at New York University and Harvard Business School published their analysis of the emails and online meetings of 3.1 million remote workers in such cities as Chicago, New York, London, Tel Aviv and Brussels, in the very early phases of their countries' first lockdowns. They found that the length of the average working day had increased by 8.2%, or nearly 50 minutes, "largely due to writing emails and attending meetings beyond office hours"."

"Unlike other face recognition technology, their algorithm allows quick searches in big data sets. "Three million searches in a database of nearly 1bn photographs: that's hundreds of trillions of comparisons, and all on four normal servers. With this algorithm, you can search through a billion photographs in less than a second from a normal computer," said Kabakov, during an interview at the company's modest central Moscow office. The app will give you the most likely match to the face that is uploaded, as well as 10 people it thinks look similar."

"There aren't many exit nodes out there. Many people fear that running an exit node will put them in police crosshairs if it gets used in the commission of a crime. For the record, Boing Boing runs a very high-capacity exit node, and though we've received multiple contacts from US law enforcement, we've just explained that this is a Tor node that runs with logging switched off, and thus we have no information that'll be relevant to any investigations, and the officers involved have thanked us and gone away without further trouble. "

"Some are disturbed by the strategy to go "digital by default". Andrew Miller, chair of the Commons science and technology committee, wrote to Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude with concerns that "as public services go online, the government may not keep up with advances in technology and that inadequacies in government software may lead to security vulnerabilities"."

"Now the BBC reports that Homesafe was built by Huawei, the Chinese IT giant Huawei, founded by Ren Zhengfei, a former officer in China's People's Liberation Army. Huawei has been characterized by senior Western spooks as an arm of the Chinese intelligence service, conducting industrial espionage on its behalf. "

""We don't do facial recognition, we do face detection," Ke Quang, chief operating officer of Quividi, told the Guardian on Monday. "It's software which works from the video feed coming off the camera. It can detect if it's seeing a face, but it never records the image or biomorphological information or traits."

"On the surface of it, the incident is entirely trivial: in a thoughtless moment, a police officer on a surveillance helicopter decides to tweet a photo of a celebrity he's spotted (in this case Michael McIntyre), briefly adding the Metropolitan police to the ranks of London paparazzi. The Met's snap had a few features a standard press photo lacks, though, including an exact timestamp, location data, and a vantage point from an expensive and taxpayer-funded aerial spot. Online reaction to the photograph was predictably bad - why are police invading the privacy of someone who's doing nothing wrong? - and was followed by questioning whether the photo breached the Data Protection Act, which it may well have done."