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"This week, the company released a new form of facial recognition called periocular recognition, which can supposedly identify individuals by just their eyes and eyebrows. Rank One says the new system uses an entirely different algorithm from its standard facial recognition system and is specifically meant for masked individuals. Rank One says it will ship the technology to all of its active customers for free."

"The streaming video company's recommendation algorithm can sometimes send you on an hours-long video binge so captivating that you never notice the time passing. But according to a study from software nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, trusting the algorithm means you're actually more likely to see videos featuring sexualized content and false claims than personalized interests."

"KanKan's capabilities include gathering data on in-store traffic, such as how long a customer lingers at a specific shelf, monitors stock levels and staff activity, and even takes note of the emotions of shoppers as they walk around a store."

"The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) unveiled a 30-point draft proposal for "algorithm recommendation management regulations" that would directly affect companies including ByteDance, Tencent Holdings and Kuaishou Technology. The rules would forbid practices that "encourage addiction or high consumption", as well as any activities that endanger national security or disrupt social and economic order."

"A pilot project to test facial recognition technology at boarding points in airports is underway at six airports in the country, Minister of State for Civil Aviation V K Singh informed Lok Sabha. His statement came in the response of a question about use of new hi-tech improvement in India's civil aviation sector. Ministry of Civil Aviation had introduced the Digi Yatra policy in August 2018 "to provide a contactless, seamless and paperless handling of passengers at airports from the entry gate of the terminal to the boarding point," Singh said. "

"100 Things We've Lost to the Internet. Its form seems to fit an era of short attention spans, breaking up its author's writing into short essays with headings such as "Solitude", "Ignoring people", "Leaving a message" and "A parent's undivided attention". At its best, the book reads like it mixes journalism with sociology and anthropology. To its credit, it also manages the rare feat of exploring what technology has done to us without succumbing to doom and panic."

"Early Saturday morning after hours of negotiations, the bloc agreed on the broad terms of the Digital Services Act, or DSA, which will force tech companies to take greater responsibility for content that appears on their platforms. New obligations include removing illegal content and goods more quickly, explaining to users and researchers how their algorithms work, and taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation. Companies face fines of up to six percent of their annual turnover for non-compliance. "

"This is the dystopian nightmare that Russell fears if his discipline continues on its current path and succeeds in creating super-intelligent machines. It's the scenario implicit in the philosopher Nick Bostrom's "paperclip apocalypse" thought-experiment and entertainingly simulated in the Universal Paperclips computer game. It is also, of course, heartily derided as implausible and alarmist by both the tech industry and AI researchers. One expert in the field famously joked that he worried about super-intelligent machines in the same way that he fretted about overpopulation on Mars."

"This tulip-mania de nos jours has been happening with cryptocurrencies for a while, but is about to become more frenzied as the notion that blockchain - the cryptographic technology that underpins bitcoin, Ethereum et al - can become the basis for something called Web3: a new, properly decentralised version of the world wide web (as compared with the current version in which control has become effectively centralised in a small number of giant corporations)."

"The more our attention degrades, the harder it will be to summon the personal and political energy to take on the forces stealing our focus. The first step it requires is a shift in our consciousness. We need to stop blaming ourselves, or making only demands for tiny tweaks from our employers and from tech companies. We own our own minds - and together, we can take them back from the forces that are stealing them."

"The problem with digital technology is that, for engineers, it is both intrinsically fascinating and seductively challenging, which means that they acquire a kind of tunnel vision: they are so focused on finding solutions to the technical problems that they are blinded to the wider context. At the moment, for example, the consensus-establishing processes for verifying blockchain transactions requires intensive computation, with a correspondingly heavy carbon footprint. Reducing that poses intriguing technical challenges, but focusing on them means that the engineering community isn't thinking about the governance issues raised by the technology. There may not be any central authority in a blockchain but, as Vili Lehdonvirta pointed out years ago, there are rules for what constitutes a consensus and, therefore, a question about who exactly sets those rules. The engineers? The owners of the biggest supercomputers on the chain? Goldman Sachs? These are ultimately political questions, not technical ones."

"Tech companies around the world appeared to listen. The very public and very swift removal of Russian channels on social media represented a sea change from years of prior content moderation decisions, when government requests for removals were often done with less fanfare and were frequently met with ire from human rights groups."

"But it is also revealing of a tech culture that venerates profit above social usefulness - and which takes as implicit its right to innovate without limits, despite the consequences. AI that can find its own route to wealth is likely to displace jobs, change the nature of commerce, funnel power into the hands of the few and spread unrest among the many."

"The Home Office plans to use artificial intelligence to reduce the asylum backlog, and is launching a three-day hackathon in the search for quicker ways to process the 138,052 undecided asylum cases. The government is convening academics, tech experts, civil servants and business people to form 15 multidisciplinary teams tasked with brainstorming solutions to the backlog. Teams will be invited to compete to find the most innovative solutions, and will present their ideas to a panel of judges. The winners are expected to meet the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, in Downing Street for a prize-giving ceremony."

"And some provinces are using some creepy Big Brother technology to do it. In Surat Thani, the province that contains the tourism hotspot islands of Koh Samui, Koh Phangan, and Koh Tao, the immigration office is employing new technology. Officers have equipped Smart Patrol Cars that is using advanced facial recognition to check foreigners quickly. Immigration officers are patrolling in WiFi-enabled cars, usually a BMW, to crack down on foreigners who have overstayed."

"The chief working officer of Techbuyer, an IT asset disposal firm in Harrogate, was standing in a big windowless room of an information centre in London surrounded by hundreds of used exhausting drives owned by a bank card firm. Knowing he might wipe the drives and promote them on, he provided a six-figure sum for all of the units. The reply was no. Instead, a lorry could be pushed as much as the positioning and the data-storing units could be dropped inside by authorised safety personnel. Then industrial machines would shred them into tiny fragments. "

"A POPULAR news outlet has been publishing articles written by AI since November, keeping it on the down low. Tech media site CNET has been publishing the articles since November, and lots of readers don't seem to have noticed."

"Could office emails go the way of the fax machine and the rolodex? They have not joined those workplace dinosaurs yet, but there were signs of evolutionary change at the annual gathering of business leaders in Davos this week, where tech bosses said emails were becoming outdated. The chief executive of the IT firm Wipro, which employs 260,000 people worldwide, said about 10% of his staff "don't even check one email per month" and that he used Instagram and LinkedIn to talk to staff."

"Journal editors, researchers and publishers are now debating the place of such AI tools in the published literature, and whether it's appropriate to cite the bot as an author. Publishers are racing to create policies for the chatbot, which was released as a free-to-use tool in November by tech company OpenAI in San Francisco, California."

"The intriguing echo of Eliza in thinking about ChatGPT is that people regard it as magical even though they know how it works - as a "stochastic parrot" (in the words of Timnit Gebru, a well-known researcher) or as a machine for "hi-tech plagiarism" (Noam Chomsky). But actually we do not know the half of it yet - not the CO2 emissions incurred in training its underlying language model or the carbon footprint of all those delighted interactions people are having with it. Or, pace Chomsky, that the technology only exists because of its unauthorised appropriation of the creative work of millions of people that just happened to be lying around on the web? What's the business model behind these tools? And so on. Answer: we don't know."