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"Researchers have shown that given access to only an API, a way to remotely use software without having it on your computer, it's possible to reverse-engineer machine learning algorithms with up to 99% accuracy. In the real world, this would mean being able to steal AI products from companies like Microsoft and IBM, and use them for free. Small companies built around a single machine learning API could lose any competitive advantage."

""It's accelerating because there's a wide-open, unprotected landscape that people can go to," says Chris Carlson, vice president of product management at Qualys. "It's a gold rush to capture these devices for botnets.""

"re than a thousand British schools are monitoring pupils' online communication for bullying and self-harm using software that analyses and translates slang for teachers. The software uses a constantly updated dictionary which includes words that most adults would not understand. These include acronyms such as "gnoc" (get naked on camera) and "dirl" (die in real life) and words such as Bio-Oil, a commercial product which can be used by children who self-harm to reduce the appearance of scarring."

"Big data is the advance in data management technology, which allows for an increase in the scale and manipulation of a company's data. It allows companies to know more about their customers, products and their own infrastructure. More recently, people have become increasingly focused on the monetization of that data."

"Understanding how our driving data will be used is important, but we should be scrutinising other companies and products too"

"As soon as 20 years from now, 45 percent of American jobs may be performed by computers, as many as 10 million self-driving cars will be on the roads, and robots-computerized machines-will infiltrate almost every arena of our daily lives, from healthcare to energy production."

"The researchers, led by Dr Mark Graham from the university's Oxford Internet Institute, argue that the study shows that "local voices rarely represent and define their own country". Instead, high-income countries have a disproportionately loud voice on the crowd-sourced encyclopedia, so countries that have many Wikipedia editors can "dominate the production of knowledge about smaller countries""

"The universities admissions service, Ucas, broke data protection rules when it signed up teenagers to receive adverts about mobile phones, energy drinks and other products, the information commissioner has ruled."

""We were sitting on metadata [information about emails, such as sender, recipient and time of delivery], so we knew it was only a matter of time before someone would come to us," says Mike Janke, Silent Circle's co-founder and chief executive. "Email was different - the rest of our products have no metadata, no IP logging, no way - but email was fundamentally broken.""

"This story is getting squrrelier and squrrelier. Yes, security companies love to hype the threat to sell their products and services. But this goes further: single-handedly trying to create a panic, and then profiting off that panic."

"A story on the site of the Japanese broadcaster NHK shows how this is playing out in the world of social networks. Online criticism of the behavior of the President of South Korea following the sinking of the ferry MV Sewol prompted the government to set up a team to monitor online activity. That, in its turn, has led people to seek what the NHK article calls "cyber-asylum" -- online safety through the use of foreign mobile messaging services, which aren't spied on so easily by the South Korean authorities. According to the NHK article: Many users have switched [from the hugely-popular home-grown product KakaoTalk] to a German chat app called Telegram. It had 50,000 users in early September. Now 2 million people have signed up."

""Robots can't deal with the degree of individualization and the many variants that we have today," Mercedes' head of production Markus Schaefer told Bloomberg. "We're saving money and safeguarding our future by employing more people.""

"GliaCloud's product, GliaStudio, uses artificial intelligence to automatically create video summaries of text articles. What it does is analyze and summarize a text story and generate a video out of the data - complete with voiceover as well as photos and video clips from its content partners and public sources."

""Privacy Not Included" is Mozilla's Christmas shopping (anti)-guide to toys and gadgets that spy on you and/or make stupid security blunders, rated by relative "creepiness," from the Nintendo Switch (a little creepy) to the Fredi Baby monitor (very creepy!). Mozilla's reviews include a detailed rationale for each ranking, including whether the product includes encryption, whether it forces a default password change, how easy to understand the documentation is, whether it shares your data for "unexpected reasons," whether it has known security vulnerabilities, whether it has parental controls and more."

"About two years ago the retail team lost another key task: negotiating with major brands and manufacturers the terms of popular sales on the site called "Lightning Deals." Common during the holidays as well as Mother's Day and Father's Day, they help move lots of inventory in a short period. Now, instead of calling their vendor manager at Amazon, the makers of handbags, smartphone accessories and other products simply logged into an Amazon portal that would determine if Amazon liked the deal being offered and the quantity it was willing to buy. No small talk. No give and take. Thousands of Amazon man hours spent forecasting demand, planning marketing strategies and negotiating deals was now handled by software, a major leap in efficiency."

"Kim Zetter asked them, on behalf of the New York Times, if their products shipped with backdoors allowing remote parties to access and alter them over the internet, they told her unequivocally that they did not engage in this practice. But now, in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden [D-OR], they admit that they lied, and that they "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006.""

"Across the technology industry, rank-and-file employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they build. At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech startups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere."

"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."