Group items tagged

"A "massive anti-vaccination campaign" has been cited by the European Commission as a reason for social media platforms to intensify their factchecking and revise the internal algorithms that can amplify disinformation. Under a revised code of practice proposed by Brussels, companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter would need to show why particular material is disseminated and prove that false information is being blocked."

"Common-sense reasoning - the ability to make mundane inferences using basic knowledge about the world, like the fact that "matches" plus "logs" usually equals "fire" - has resisted AI researchers' efforts for decades."

"Major technology companies signed a pact Friday to voluntarily adopt "reasonable precautions" to prevent artificial intelligence tools from being used to disrupt democratic elections around the world. Executives from Adobe, Amazon, Google, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and TikTok gathered at the Munich Security Conference to announce a new framework for how they respond to AI-generated deepfakes that deliberately trick voters. Twelve other companies - including Elon Musk's X - are also signing on to the accord."

"Why has Bitcoin become so popular? One possible explanation is that exploding interest in Bitcoin over the past several days is being driven by economic uncertainty in Europe. Fearful of an earlier proposed European Union plan to partially fund a Cypriot bailout by imposing new taxes on Cypriots' bank deposits, goes the theory, some Cypriots (and Spaniards, for similar reasons) flocked to Bitcoin to attempt an escape from the clutches of potential taxes."

"Bruce Schneier makes the point that if the Russian state is behind the DNC hacks, there's no reason to expect that its attacks on the US political system will end there. Voting machines are so notoriously terrible that they'd be a very tempting target for Russia or other states that want to influence the outcome in 2016 (or merely destabilize the US by calling into question the outcome in an election). "

"While biometrics may not be the long term alternative to passwords, they are safer to use. Rather than seeing them as separate methods to identify that you are who you say you are, they should instead be viewed as complementary methods that can be used together to verify an individual."

"Those changes happened relatively slowly, but it seems to me that employment disruption is accelerating. A large reason for this is that what used to be a room-sized super computer now fits in my pocket. Over the last two decades, I have observed a fundamental change in how we can apply advanced algorithms to sensing and controlling systems-the kinds of technology that enable more sophisticated robotic manufacturing. I can remember discussing various algorithms and believing they were well beyond what we could ever implement. Now these same algorithms are considered elementary. They are just some of the changes that have fueled the revolution in manufacturing."

Does not this suggest one reason that people should not be prosecuted - as an IP address is never a secure and final way of identifying a downloader?

"The secure email service used by US whistleblower Edward Snowden has shut down rather than comply with orders from US security services - and is also legally barred from speaking out. The owner and operator of Lavabit, Ladar Levison, took the service down yesterday "for maintenance" before revealing today that the real reason was demands from US intelligence."

"The reason is that routine big-data analytical techniques can now effectively manufacture personal data that is not protected by any of the measures we've used up to now. A well-known illustration of this is the way Target, an American retail chain, creatively collated scattered pieces of data about individuals' changes in shopping habits to predict the delivery date of pregnant shoppers - so that they could then be targeted with relevant advertisements."

"That's right, two thirds of the digital image is interpolated by the processor in the conversion from RAW to JPG or TIF. It's reality but not as we know it. For obvious commercial reasons camera manufacturers are careful to reconstruct the digital image in a form that mimics the familiar old photograph and consumers barely noticed a difference in the resulting image, but there are very few limitations on how the RAW data could be handled and reality could be reconstructed in any number of ways."

"The dataset that we analyzed in this report spanned hundreds of users over several months. Phone records held by the NSA and telecoms span millions of Americans over multiple years. Reasonable minds can disagree about the policy and legal constraints that should be imposed on those databases. The science, however, is clear: phone metadata is highly sensitive."

"When it comes to the speed of these improvements, Yudkowsky says its important to not confuse the current speed of AI research with the speed of a real AI once built. Those are two very different things. What's more, there's no reason to believe that an AI won't show a sudden huge leap in intelligence, resulting in an ensuing "intelligence explosion" (a better term for the Singularity)."

""I have no reason to doubt it - he was just in the right place at the right time, and it was a once-in-a-lifetime photo." But others questioned its veracity, including American evolutionary biologist Dan Graur. He said: "This is a fake photo if I ever saw one. The uniform blurred background is pure Photoshop."

"The really significant thing about AlphaGo is that it (and its creators) cannot explain its moves. And yet it plays a very difficult game expertly. So it's displaying a capability eerily similar to what we call intuition - "knowledge obtained without conscious reasoning". Up to now, we have regarded that as an exclusively human prerogative. It's what Newton was on about when he wrote "Hypotheses non fingo" in the second edition of his Principia: "I don't make hypotheses," he's saying, "I just know.""

""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."

"I've got a theory of change I call the "peak indifference" theory. The early stage of a crisis involves trying to convince people that the crisis even exists, because things haven't gotten really terrible yet and it's not obvious that there's anything to really worry about, and the people who profit from the status quo will spend liberally to convince people that there's no reason to worry or change anything (see also: climate change, Facebook, cancer from smoking)."

"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."

"As with any habitual behavior, you might reasonably expect that abstaining would lead to an improved mood and an overall sense of wellbeing. A new study goes a long way toward suggesting the benefits of cutting Facebook out of our lives altogether."

"which binds over all tech companies to serve as "data fiduciaries," with a legal requirement to use your data in ways that benefit you -- and not ways that benefit themselves at your expense (lawyers, doctors and other professionals have similar fiduciary duties); specifically, companies must not use your data in ways that would be "unexpected and highly offensive to a reasonable consumer.""