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The Treasury's decision to close the education ICT agency Becta by November, cutting £80m from this financial year's government budget, has dismayed its 240 staff - and some teachers who found its work especially useful because it provided a central platform for standardising on technology.

"With news that the 15 million Twitter users in the UK can now be targeted at individual postcode levels, the micro-blogging platform is selling its advertising opportunities as ultra-geographically precise, and therefore ultra-cost effective. "The key benefit of geo-targeting is that it enables advertisers, or in this case political parties, the ability to reach users in specific regions, metropolitan areas and now postcodes," Twitter said in a blog post. "

"Regin is a tool capable of infecting and compromising entire networks, not just individual computers, as security companies Symantec and Kaspersky Labs detailed in their technical reports published on Sunday and Monday. It's not only a computer virus or malware, but also a toolkit or platform that can be used for different purposes, depending on the needs of the attackers. It can collect passwords, retrieve deleted files, and even take over entire networks and infrastructures, according to researchers. "

"Marlinspike's Textsecure has an impeccable reputation as a secure platform, and Whatsapp founder Jan Koum attributes his desire to add security to his users' conversations to his experiences with the surveillance state while growing up in Soviet Ukraine. However, without any independent security audit or (even better) source-code publication, we have to take the company's word that it has done the right thing and that it's done it correctly."

"This is where Google's Project Shield comes through: sites pre-register with Google to "reverse proxy" their traffic through Google's cloud platform. By making a change in DNS, publishers can route all their traffic through Google. This means that a DDoS attack has to be sufficiently robust as to take down Google's cloud (much harder than taking down a WordPress install on a rack in a commodity hosting provider)"

"The algorithmic manager seems to watch everything you do. Ride-hailing platforms track a variety of personalized statistics, including ride acceptance rates, cancellation rates, hours spent logged in to the app and trips completed. And they display selected statistics to individual drivers as motivating tools, like "You're in the top 10 percent of partners!" Uber uses the accelerometer in drivers' phones along with GPS and gyroscope to give them safe driving reports, tracking their performance in granular detail. One driver posted to a forum that a grade of 210 out of 247 "smooth accelerations" earned a "Great work!" from the boss."

"Tufekci describes how insurgent, democratic movements were early arrivals to the internet, and how clumsy authoritarians' attempts to fight them by shutting the net down only energized their movements. But canny authoritarians mastered the platforms, figuring out how to game their automated algorithms to upvote their messages, and how to game their moderation policies to banish their adversaries."

"The articles were so widely and quickly shared that they triggered Facebook's spam filters, which blocked the most popular stories about the breach, including an AP story and a Guardian story. There's no reason to think that Facebook intentionally suppressed embarrassing news about its own business. Rather, this is a cautionary tale about the consequences of content filtering on big platforms."

"Under the proposal, online platforms would have to spend hundreds of millions of euros on algorithmic copyright filters that would compare everything users tried to post with a database of supposedly copyrighted works, which anyone could add anything to, and block any suspected matches. This would snuff out all the small EU competitors to America's Big Tech giants, and put all Europeans' communications under threat of arbitrary censorship by balky, unaccountable, easily abused algorithms."

"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."

"Unlike other companies, Zebra's algorithms provide an actual diagnosis, completely automatically using only imaging data. This is a very new field - older technology was always driven by the radiologist, and never automatic. The algorithms are part of the Zebra Analytics Platform - a cloud based analytics engine that receives medical imaging studies, analyzes them and returns results to participating hospitals and physicians."

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

"It found that social media bots were used by many countries to drum up ideas aligning with party messaging, by inflating social media engagement, "creating an artificial sense of popularity, momentum or relevance." An army of 500 to "amplify" ideas In Duterte's case, his social media manager has said they've used some 400 to 500 people to "amplify" ideas. They individually handled groups on platforms like Facebook, that each had hundreds to hundreds of thousands of followers."

"While some experts still disagree, most now believe that Conficker was the work of Ukrainian cybercriminals building a platform for global theft who succeeded beyond all expectation, or desire. The last thing a thief wants is to draw attention to himself. Conficker's unprecedented growth drew the alarmed attention of cybersecurity experts worldwide. It became, simply, too hot to use."

"To date, the presence of Babylon's GP surgery in London has forced the NHS to reallocate millions of pounds in funding to mitigate for the disruption it has caused. Its expansion plans have been blocked before being allowed to proceed. But concerns linger with clinicians questioning the GP surgery's impact and the effectiveness of its much-hyped artificial intelligence platform."

"Specifically, the question is whether that algorithm is sorting suggestions based on the race of the creator - something TikTok denies it's doing intentionally. But it's another example of the need for more scrutiny into how the app and other social media platforms promote particular creators or content."

"The app, which scraped billions of photos from the likes of Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and other online platforms, drew the world's attention last weekend following a detailed report in the New York Times. The app's supposed capability to identify practically anyone from even low-quality photos frightened privacy advocates and officials. And today, one of the latter - New Jersey's attorney general Gurbir Grewal - actually did something about it."

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

"Facebook has blocked a group of hackers in China who used the platform to target Uighurs living abroad with links to malware that would infect their devices and enable surveillance."

"Qoves founder Shafee Hassan claimed to MIT Technology Review that beauty scoring is widespread; social media platforms use it to identify attractive faces and give them more attention."