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"This new paper asked professionals to write realistic memos, strategy documents and policies. The ones who were given ChatGPT completed tasks 37% faster, and their average writing quality increased as well. All of this is without added training or extensive experience using ChatGPT (which I found makes a huge difference)."

" A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company's chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police. The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday. "(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake," senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city's public broadcaster RTHK. Chan said the worker had grown suspicious after he received a message that was purportedly from the company's UK-based chief financial officer. Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked of the need for a secret transaction to be carried out. However, the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said."

"The NSA has a tool that records and analyzes all the flow of data that the spy agency collects around the world. Think of it as a global data-mining software that details exactly how much intelligence, and of what type, has been collected from every country in the world. It's aptly called "Boundless Informant." "

"The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet."

"Yik Yak has come in for a lot of criticism for being a breeding ground for rumour and bullying - and more serious content. Myriad threats of violence, sex crimes and hate crimes have been reported, including a mass shooting threat and the circulation of a sex tape. It wouldn't be unfair to say it has gained a reputation for being a scourge among parents."

"The Chinese government has curbed freedoms in the province for the local Muslim population, installing facial recognition cameras on streets and in mosques and reportedly forcing residents to download software that searches their phones."

"MEETINGS ON ZOOM, the increasingly popular video conferencing service, are encrypted using an algorithm with serious, well-known weaknesses, and sometimes using keys issued by servers in China, even when meeting participants are all in North America, according to researchers at the University of Toronto."

"All of this led Estonia to two inevitable conclusions. The first was that residency didn't have to have anything to do with geography. And so in 2014, e-residency was born."

"According to these internal documents, SIAM is a computer system that works behind the scenes of Iranian cellular networks, providing its operators a broad menu of remote commands to alter, disrupt, and monitor how customers use their phones. The tools can slow their data connections to a crawl, break the encryption of phone calls, track the movements of individuals or large groups, and produce detailed metadata summaries of who spoke to whom, when, and where. Such a system could help the government invisibly quash the ongoing protests - or those of tomorrow - an expert who reviewed the SIAM documents told The Intercept."

"To arrive at a recommended rent, the software deploys an algorithm - a set of mathematical rules - to analyze a trove of data RealPage gathers from clients, including private information on what nearby competitors charge. For tenants, the system upends the practice of negotiating with apartment building staff. RealPage discourages bargaining with renters and has even recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money. One of the algorithm's developers told ProPublica that leasing agents had "too much empathy" compared to computer generated pricing."