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"There will be more where that came from. So it's time for a reality check. Quantum computers are interesting, but experience so far suggests they are exceedingly tricky to build and even harder to scale up. There are now about 50 working machines, most of them minuscule in terms of qubits. The biggest is one of IBM's, which has - wait for it - 433 qubits, which means scaling up to 20m qubits might, er, take a while. This will lead realists to conclude that RSA encryption is safe for the time being and critics to say that it's like nuclear fusion and artificial general intelligence - always 50 years in the future."

"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change at the annual gathering of business leaders in Davos this week, where tech bosses said emails were becoming outdated.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."

"The US battle with TikTok over data privacy concerns and Chinese influence has been heating up for years, and recent measures have brought college campuses to the forefront - with a number of schools banning the app entirely on campus wifi. Students have responded, of course, on TikTok. Taking advantage of viral sounds, they have expressed outrage at their favourite app being blocked at universities like Auburn, Oklahoma and Texas A&M in the past few months. "Do they not realize people in college are actually adults?" one user wrote. "We should make our own independent decision to use TikTok or not," another said."

"Open AI researchers said that while it was "impossible to reliably detect all AI-written text", good classifiers could pick up signs that text was written by AI. The tool could be useful in cases where AI was used for "academic dishonesty" and when AI chatbots were positioned as humans, they said."

"US and European fears about China exploiting TikTok's data harvest and promoting Beijing's worldview look set to inspire an urgent overhaul in data privacy laws"

"Ransomware hunters: the self-taught tech geniuses fighting cybercrime"

"Consumer faith in cybersecurity, data privacy, and responsible AI hinges on what companies do today-and establishing this digital trust just might lead to business growth. "

"In the final sprint to the US midterm elections the social media giant TikTok risks being a major vector for election misinformation, experts warn, with the platform's huge user base and its design making it particularly susceptible to such threats."

"The legal but harmful provisions have become a lightning rod for concerns that the bill will result in an overly censorious approach on social media platforms. Tory MPs including David Davis have argued that the legal but harmful provisions in the bill mean tech firms will "inevitably err on the side of censorship" in how they police their platforms, while Truss has said she wants to "make sure free speech is allowed" when the bill comes back."

"TikTok's algorithm is famously effective, yet hard to study. As part of the Guardian's special series on the platform's explosive rise, we tested how the algorithm treats different users. We wondered what would happen if three people - with varying ages, backgrounds, and familiarity with the platform - created new accounts and recorded what they saw."

"Owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok's success - more than 1 billion users worldwide - is combining with well-established fears about social media's data collection practices and concerns over China's geo-political ambitions to generate a background hum of distrust about the app. "As the geopolitical situation changes I suspect we will see companies such as TikTok will continue to be treated with some caution in the west," says Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University."

"KataGo's world-class AI learned Go by playing millions of games against itself. But that still isn't enough experience to cover every possible scenario, which leaves room for vulnerabilities from unexpected behavior. "KataGo generalizes well to many novel strategies, but it does get weaker the further away it gets from the games it saw during training," says Gleave. "Our adversary has discovered one such 'off-distribution' strategy that KataGo is particularly vulnerable to, but there are likely many others.""

"Getty points to images produced by Stable Diffusion which contain its copyright watermark, suggesting that Stable Diffusion has ingested and is reproducing copyrighted material without permission (Stability AI has not yet commented publicly on the lawsuit). The same level of evidence is harder to come by when examining ChatGPT's text output, but there is no doubt that it has been trained on copyrighted material. OpenAI will be hoping that its text generation is covered by "fair use", a provision in copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material for "transformative" purposes. That idea will probably one day be tested in court."

"It comes as a Guardian investigation reveals the human stories behind scams that originate on Meta's platforms, with a nationwide estimate released this week predicting the tech firm's failure to stamp out fraud will cost UK households £250m during 2023. With someone in the UK said to fall victim to a purchase scam starting on either Facebook or Instagram every seven minutes, the Guardian asked people who had been defrauded on these sites as well as its WhatsApp platform to get in touch. One Facebook user told us she was defrauded of her life savings and got pulled into debt, losing a total of £70,000, after being duped by an investment scam. While some people lost large amounts of money, a stream of unsuspecting online shoppers reported being conned out of smaller amounts when they placed orders with bogus online shops advertised on Facebook and Instagram."

"Amazon is to pay $25m (£20m) to settle allegations that it violated children's privacy rights with its Alexa voice assistant. The company agreed to pay the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after it was accused of failing to delete Alexa recordings at the request of parents. It was found to have kept hold of sensitive data for years. Amazon's doorbell camera unit Ring will also pay out after giving employees unrestricted access to customers' data."

"In its complaint, the FTC said Amazon used "manipulative, coercive or deceptive user-interface designs known as 'dark patterns' to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically renewing Prime subscriptions". It said the option to purchase items on Amazon without subscribing to Prime was more difficult in many cases. It also said that consumers were sometimes presented with a button to complete their transactions - which did not clearly state it would also enroll them into Prime."

"Employees use Hubstaff, one of the myriad monitoring tools that companies turned to as the Covid pandemic forced many to work remotely. Some, such as CleverControl and FlexiSPY offer webcam monitoring and audio recording. Mae says she often has dry eyes and a sore head at the end of the working day. "Tracking doesn't allow for thinking time or stepping away and coming back to work - it's very intense.""

"Over the next few months, Lipkin's assignments dwindled. Managers began referring to her as "Olivia/ChatGPT" on Slack. In April, she was let go without explanation, but when she found managers writing about how using ChatGPT was cheaper than paying a writer, the reason for her layoff seemed clear. "Whenever people brought up ChatGPT, I felt insecure and anxious that it would replace me," she said. "Now I actually had proof that it was true, that those anxieties were warranted and now I was actually out of a job because of AI.""

"In a Copenhagen suburb, a fifth-grade classroom is having its weekly cake-eating session, a common tradition in Danish public schools. While the children are eating chocolate cake, the teacher pulls up an infographic on a whiteboard: a bar chart generated by a digital platform that collects data on how they've been feeling. Organized to display the classroom's weekly "mood landscape," the data shows that the class averaged a mood of 4.4 out of 5, and the children rated their family life highly. "That's great!" the teacher exclaims, raising two thumbs up in the air. She then moves to an infographic on sleep hygiene. Here the data shows the students struggling, and the teacher invites them to think of ways to improve their sleeping habits. After briefly talking among themselves, the children suggest "less screen time at night," "meditation before sleep," and "having a hot bath." They collectively make a commitment to implement these strategies. At next week's cake time, they will be asked whether or not they followed through."

""In 2022, the Shanghai National Police (SHGA) database was leaked. This database contains many TB of data and information on billions of Chinese citizen," the post said. "Databases contain information on 1 billion Chinese national residents and several billion case records, including: name, address, birthplace, national ID number, mobile number, all crime/case details.""