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"Now, there's a new concern: malicious apps developed by third parties and hosted by Amazon or Google. The threat isn't just theoretical. Whitehat hackers at Germany's Security Research Labs developed eight apps-four Alexa "skills" and four Google Home "actions"-that all passed Amazon or Google security-vetting processes. The skills or actions posed as simple apps for checking horoscopes, with the exception of one, which masqueraded as a random-number generator. Behind the scenes, these "smart spies," as the researchers call them, surreptitiously eavesdropped on users and phished for their passwords."

"In just the past few months, three cities - San Francisco, Oakland, and Somerville, Massachusetts - have passed laws to ban government use of the controversial technology, which analyzes pictures or live video of human faces in order to identify them. Cambridge, Massachusetts, is also moving toward a government ban. Congress recently held two oversight hearings on the topic and there are at least four pieces of current federal legislation to limit the technology in some way. "

"We live in a performative age. We're rewarded for revealing our private lives to strangers, for exaggerating our emotions online, for sharing every crisis that happens in our bodies, every thought that passes through our heads. So many of us now depend on the reactions of strangers for our own identity."

"Thailand continues to embrace advanced technology, announcing that five smaller upcountry airports will pilot a facial recognition system to reduce lines, speed immigration procedures, and increase safety. Should the pilot project prove successful, it would be scaled up nationwide. "Currently, travelers may be required to show their ID cards or passports up to three times in one trip through an airport," said Deputy Transport Minister Thaworn Senneam."

"Thailand continues to embrace advanced technology, announcing that five smaller upcountry airports will pilot a facial recognition system to reduce lines, speed immigration procedures, and increase safety. Should the pilot project prove successful, it would be scaled up nationwide. "Currently, travelers may be required to show their ID cards or passports up to three times in one trip through an airport," said Deputy Transport Minister Thaworn Senneam. Officials expect the new system will eliminate the need for immigration police officers to inspect passports. As the number of tourists and business travelers has been steadily increasing over the years, immigration lines at Thailand's major airports have grown longer, causing inconvenience to visitors and inspiring some complaints. The new system will also benefit Thais, as they must also present national identification cards at airports under the current system. Under the new system, travelers "can have their faces scanned just once at check-in counters and then board a plane without the need to show their ID cards, passports or boarding passes," Thaworn said. The five airports that will participate in the pilot project are Krabi and Surat Thani airports in the South, and Udon Thani, Ubon Ratchathani, and Khon Kaen airports in the Northeast. Not all aspects of the system have been ironed out. A panel is being formed to study the new identification system with representatives from the Department of Airports, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Royal Thai Police. They plan to work out synchronize their databases, which store information on Thai and foreign travelers."

"The streaming video company's recommendation algorithm can sometimes send you on an hours-long video binge so captivating that you never notice the time passing. But according to a study from software nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, trusting the algorithm means you're actually more likely to see videos featuring sexualized content and false claims than personalized interests."

"They join attempts by lawmakers to regulate the internet for kids. States have proposed and even passed laws that restrict what children can access online, up to banning certain services entirely. On the federal level, several recently introduced bipartisan bills run the gamut from giving children more privacy protections to forbidding them from using social media at all. Some efforts also try to control the content that children can be exposed to. Critics of such legislation point to privacy issues with age verification mechanisms and fears that forced content moderation will inevitably lead to censorship, preventing kids from seeing material that's helpful along with what's considered harmful."

"If AI causes mass unemployment among the general populace, it will be the first time in history that any technology has ever done that. Industrial machinery, computer-controlled machine tools, software applications, and industrial robots all caused panics about human obsolescence, and nothing of the kind ever came to pass; pretty much everyone who wants a job still has a job. As Noah has written, a wave of recent evidence shows that adoption of industrial robots and automation technology in general is associated with an increase in employment at the company and industry level."

"As we pass back through the factory, something catches my eye: a pallet of TV screens from a major manufacturer, still neatly boxed and plastic-wrapped. They are brand new, but here to be shredded: "They don't want this product resold and competing against their new products, so they want it all destroyed." I'd expected to see this at ERI, but not so brazenly. Manufacturers and retailers routinely destroy returns and unsold items, known as deadstock, en masse. As Kyle Wiens, founder of the repair chain iFixit, tells me, these "must-shred" contracts are the "dirty secret" of the recycling industry. ("The recyclers are desperate for manufacturer contracts, so they'll do anything and keep their mouths shut," Wiens says.) In 2021, for instance, an ITV News investigation in the UK found Amazon was sending millions of new and returned items a year to be destroyed. (Amazon says it has since stopped the practice.)"

"The camera never lies. Except, of course, it does - and seemingly more often with each passing day. In the age of the smartphone, digital edits on the fly to improve photos have become commonplace, from boosting colours to tweaking light levels. Now, a new breed of smartphone tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are adding to the debate about what it means to photograph reality. Google's latest smartphones released last week, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, go a step further than devices from other companies. They are using AI to help alter people's expressions in photographs. It's an experience we've all had: one person in a group shot looks away from the camera or fails to smile. Google's phones can now look through your photos to mix and match from past expressions, using machine learning to put a smile from a different photo of them into the picture. Google calls it Best Take. "

"Next, was two months of probation where we moderated on practice queues that consisted of hundreds of thousands of videos that had already been moderated. The policies we applied to these practice videos were compared with what had previously been applied to them by a more experienced moderator in order to find areas we needed to improve in. Everyone passed their probation. One trend that is particularly hated by moderators are the "recaps". These consist of a 15- to 60-second barrage of pictures, sometimes hundreds, shown as a super fast slideshow often with three to four pictures a second. We have to view every one of these photos for infractions. If a video is 60 seconds long then the system will allocate us around 48 seconds to do this. We also have to check the video description, account bio and hashtags. Around the end of the school year or New Year's Eve, when these sort of videos are popular, it becomes incredibly draining and also affects our stats. "

"This election is the first time we face the danger of post-ChatGPT AI in a high-stakes sociopolitical scenario. That is new. Bots pass the Turing test (which means they write and speak indistinguishably from real people). They're also more persuasive. Image and video generators can make realistic faces, which people use mostly to make jokes but also to plant doubt. We will eventually adapt to perception-altering algorithms but for now, they're a big unsolved problem. Here are five ways the bad guys can weaponize AI to influence the US democratic election."

Tenant-screening systems like SafeRent are often used in place of humans as a way to 'avoid engaging' directly with the applicants and pass the blame for a denial to a computer system, said Todd Kaplan, one of the attorneys representing Louis and the class of plaintiffs who sued the company. The property management company told Louis the software alone decided to reject her, but the SafeRent report indicated it was the management company that set the threshold for how high someone needed to score to have their application accepted. Louis and the other named plaintiff alleged SafeRent's algorithm disproportionately scored Black and Hispanic renters who use housing vouchers lower than white applicants. SafeRent has settled. In addition to making a $2.3m payment, the company has agreed to stop using a scoring system or make any kind of recommendation when it comes to prospective tenants who used housing vouchers for five years.

"However, there is some concern about how accurate these new procedures will be. Apparently the facial recognition technology doesn't recognize all people will the same accuracy. White women and black people aren't as easily recognized as white men, meaning there could be some mismatching of identities. Some are also concerned that this is crossing the line in terms of passenger privacy."

"How can we help kids excel at the things that humans will always do better than AI?" Great talk - she also presented at recent IB conference in Yokohama.

""I consider 'bias' a euphemism," says Brandeis Marshall, PhD, data scientist and CEO of DataedX, an edtech and data science firm. "The words that are used are varied: There's fairness, there's responsibility, there's algorithmic bias, there's a number of terms… but really, it's dancing around the real topic… A dataset is inherently entrenched in systemic racism and sexism.""

"Private citizens are entitled to a minimum of $1,000 in fines if they are subjected to a facial recognition scan by police"

"China's biggest tech stocks dropped sharply after the country approved a strict data privacy law, prompting renewed concerns among investors over the intensity of Beijing's regulatory crackdown."

"On Wednesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law that directly affects "mega-retailers" like Amazon, and how these companies use algorithms to manage warehouse workers. Mega-retailers are those that employ more than 1,000 warehouse workers, and they include one of Amazon's main competitors, Walmart."

""As expected, we found evidence of a performance improvement over generations due to social learning," the researchers wrote. "Adding an algorithm with a different problem-solving bias than humans temporarily improved human performance but improvements were not sustained in following generations. While humans did copy solutions from the algorithm, they appeared to do so at a lower rate than they copied other humans' solutions with comparable performance." Brinkmann told Motherboard that while they were surprised superior solutions weren't more commonly adopted, this was in line with other research suggesting human biases in decision-making persist despite social learning. Still, the team is optimistic that future research can yield insight into how to amend this."