Group items tagged

YES IAN YOU SHOULD BE READING THIS! "The authors raise three arguments: first, that "notice and choice" has been a failure ("to opt out simply stay indoors!"); second, that facial recognition fears are technophobic overreactions, and finally, that facial recognition is uniquely powerful and dangerous and needs a regulatory framework separate from other privacy rules ("to opt out, just don't have a face")."

"Now, researchers warn that these "direct to consumer" services could be vulnerable to a sort of genetic hacking. By uploading selected DNA sequences, they say, it may be possible, for example, to pull out the genomes of most people in a database or to identify people with genetic variants associated with specific traits such as Alzheimer's disease."

"In just the past few months, three cities - San Francisco, Oakland, and Somerville, Massachusetts - have passed laws to ban government use of the controversial technology, which analyzes pictures or live video of human faces in order to identify them. Cambridge, Massachusetts, is also moving toward a government ban. Congress recently held two oversight hearings on the topic and there are at least four pieces of current federal legislation to limit the technology in some way. "

"Hultquist noted that cyberwarfare evens the battlefield between Iran and the US. "That's why they choose an asymmetric battleground," he said. "We might have this massive advantage with a very sophisticated ability, but we also have this very sophisticated society that makes us very vulnerable to computer attacks.""

""The documents reveal a much clearer idea of what actually happened in the 2016 US presidential election, which has a huge bearing on what will happen in 2020. It's the same people involved who we know are building on these same techniques," she said."

"At that point, experts began taking a closer look at the document, now publicly available on the web. They discovered something else of interest: yellow dots in a roughly rectangular pattern repeated throughout the page. They were barely visible to the naked eye, but formed a coded design. After some quick analysis, they seemed to reveal the exact date and time that the pages in question were printed: 06:20 on 9 May, 2017 - at least, this is likely to be the time on the printer's internal clock at that moment. The dots also encode a serial number for the printer. "

"Citizen, which was launched in 2017, is a glorified police scanner that promises to help users "stay safe and informed". It invites input from witnesses - mostly involving shaky phone footage of police milling around while a stretcher is carted by in the background - and, bafflingly, includes a comments section, in which users speculate fatuously on the crime in question and quibble over the accuracy of the map function. It is grimly fascinating, mildly addictive and, relative to its stated aims, totally without value."

"Dozens of people who say they were subjected to death threats, racial slurs, and blackmail after their in-home Ring smart cameras were hacked are suing the company over "horrific" invasions of privacy."

"McAfee became a wholly owned subsidiary of a chip manufacturer. Crazy right? "

"The software reportedly could set off a "Uighur alarm" when it pinpointed someone from the minority group. Uighurs are a largely Muslim group, and have been subjected to extensive persecution by the hands of the Chinese government."

"The Singapore Police Force (SPF) can obtain TraceTogether data for criminal investigations"

"Officials had previously explicitly ruled out the data would be used for anything other than the virus tracking. But parliament was told on Monday it could also be used "for the purpose of criminal investigation"."

"Vivian Balakrishnan on why he had earlier said that TraceTogether app data would only be used for COVID-19 contact tracing. The Home Affairs Ministry has since said the data could be used for criminal investigations."

"In the early days of the pandemic, a panicked Israel began using a mass surveillance tool on its civilians, tracking people's cellphones in hopes of stopping the spread of the coronavirus."

"handy infographic showing the types of data each company admits to collecting"

"A woman who held jobs at a supermarket and a halfway house took down credit card information of customers at NTUC FairPrice, created an EZ-Link mobile account with details from a halfway house resident and combined the two to make S$41,330 worth of unauthorised EZ-Link top-ups."

"Wong opened the bag later that day and took her debit card from her purse. He then used it to top up his ez-link card with S$100 through the PayWave function at Somerset MRT Station."

"Biden's team is more vulnerable to cyberattacks "

""It's like Photoshop for voice," said Zohaib Ahmed, CEO of Resemble AI, about his company's voice-cloning technology."

"Zoom is not encrypting calls for free accounts with end to end encryption so they can provide law enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation with content from those calls. As protesters demonstrate in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, law enforcement has deployed a wide range of surveillance tools to monitor and track protesters－including facial recognition software and contact tracing technology. They are working to get information from every source possible to disrupt and even arrest people involved with the protests."