Group items tagged

"Michael said recent threats to the security of government-held data such as the census failure should raise real concerns about the storage of biometric data en masse. "I am worried about theft, I don't buy the story that your data is safe. I think we've become almost complacent 'oh there's been another data breach. Oh they hacked in and stole the data'," she said. "Is the next phase of rollout going to be 'oh my e-health records were taken', 'oh my biometrics at border control were taken'?""

"India's government has ordered that all online news, social media and video streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime are to be subject to state regulation, raising fears of increased censorship of digital media. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which regulates and censors print newspapers, television, films and theatre, will also have jurisdiction, under the new order, over digital news and entertainment platforms in India."

"RIGHTS DEFENDERS raised concerns yesterday over the move to force all |cellphone users in the restive South to submit their pictures for facial-recognition identification."

"Such powerful software is still several years away from being fully developed, if at all, and raises all sorts of ethical questions. But the potential applications-such as masterfully translating foreign languages, identifying objects in photos and directing self-driving cars through busy intersections-are so compelling that technology giants like Facebook and Google Inc. are investing heavily in artificial intelligence"

Three cheers for this - did any of you donate?

"If you were born around the turn of the 21st century, you've probably had to endure someone calling you a "digital native" at least once. At first, this kind of sounds like a good thing to be-raised without the taint of the offline world, and so imbued with a kind of mystic sixth sense about how the Internet should be."

"A leaked MPAA document discloses the studios' lobbyists' plan to force ISPs to give it control over DNS (one of the key goals in SOPA), by using the arguments raised in the decade-old Brand X case, where the ISPs said that they were more than a "telecommunications service" and were, instead, an "information service" because they provided DNS (among other things)."

"On the contrary, building large centralized databases and predictive algorithms that make decisions on behalf of humans, and which completely ignore privacy concerns, now seem to be the most efficient way of governing. Algorithms now handle college admissions processes, applicants' selection processes for jobs, where to go to college, what to study in that college, which city is best for you to start your career and raise a family, what part of that city you should live in, and even who you should marry."

"Eck said machine learning, a powerful form of AI, will be integrated into how humans communicate with each other. He raised the idea of "assistive writing" in the future with Google Docs, the company's online word processing software. This may be based on Google's upcoming Smart Compose technology that suggests words and phrases based on what's being typed. Teachers used to worry about whether students used Wikipedia for their homework. Now they may wonder what part of the work the students wrote themselves, Eck said."

"Firm urges regulation, raises concerns about possible misuse of fast improving technology"

"The single biggest known British political advertiser on Facebook is a mysterious pro-Brexit campaign group pushing for a no-deal exit from the EU. The revelation about Britain's Future, which has never disclosed the source of its funding or organisational structure, has raised concerns about the influence of "dark money" in British politics."

""We have only examined a tiny fraction of this code base and found a critical, election-stealing issue," said Lewis, who is currently executive director of the Open Privacy Research Society, a Canadian nonprofit that develops secure and privacy-enhancing software for marginalized communities. "Even if this [backdoor] is closed its mere existence raises serious questions about the integrity of the rest of the code.""

"Artificial intelligence researchers have developed a mosquito early warning system that raises the alarm when the insects are near by detecting the whine of their wingbeats. The system uses an app that can run on a £20 mobile phone to analyse sounds in the environment and issue a warning if it hears the telltale buzz as a mosquito swoops past."

"The Wheelie 7 kit equips a wheelchair with artificial intelligence to detect the user's expressions and process the data in real-time to direct the movement of the chair. Smiling, raising the eyebrows, wrinkling the nose or puckering the lips as if for a kiss are among the repertoire of 10 gestures recognised by the prototype Wheelie 7."

"Tech workers are in demand: companies find it easier to raise cash than to hire engineers; this gives workers enormous bargaining power, and they're using it. From the Google uprisings over a Pentagon babykiller project and a Chinese surveillance project to the Microsoft uprising over ICE contracts, tech workers are emerging as part of the solution -- while their secretive, shareholder-haunted bosses are more and more the problem."

"SINGAPORE - In the not too distant future, surveillance cameras sitting atop over 100,000 lampposts in Singapore could help authorities pick out and recognise faces in crowds across the island-state. The plan to install the cameras, which will be linked to facial recognition software, is raising privacy fears among security experts and rights groups. The government said the system would allow it to "perform crowd analytics" and support anti-terror operations."

"Explained by "Anna", a desk-sitting avatar complete with an artificial voice, the video introduces TP Observer as "a risk-mitigation tool that monitors and tracks real time employee behaviour, and detects any violations to pre-set business rules". Anna explains that this means home workers will have an AI-enabled webcam added to their computers that recognises their face, tags their location and scans for "breaches" of rules at random points during a shift."

"Researchers fed these algorithms (which function like autocomplete, but for images) pictures of a man cropped below his neck: 43% of the time the image was autocompleted with the man wearing a suit. When you fed the same algorithm a similarly cropped photo of a woman, it auto-completed her wearing a low-cut top or bikini a massive 53% of the time. For some reason, the researchers gave the algorithm a picture of the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and found that it also automatically generated an image of her in a bikini. (After ethical concerns were raised on Twitter, the researchers had the computer-generated image of AOC in a swimsuit removed from the research paper.)"