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"It's been a year since the music links on Myspace stopped working; at first the company insisted that they were working on it, but now they've admitted that all those files are lost: "As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest that you retain your back up copies."

"Flooding involves deluging the citizen with a torrent of information - some accurate, some phoney, some biased - with the aim of making people overwhelmed. In a digital world, flooding is child's play: it's cheap, effective and won't generate backlash. (En passant, it's what Russia - and Trump - do.) In her book, Roberts provides abundant evidence of how the Chinese authorities deploy these three techniques."

"The system is designed to solve the an often-ignored problem of 75% of the earth's population, an estimated 4 billion people, who have no address for mailing purposes, making it difficult to open a bank account, get a delivery, or be reached in an emergency."

"There are three big challenges in the Internet space that all countries must face in the near future. China's approach to the challenges will impact not only Chinese Internet users, but potentially all Internet users. What interface follows the smart hone, whether it be AR-enabled glasses, foldable screens, or wearable projectors, will not only be influenced by China's substantial Internet-using population, but also by their manufacturing. Privacy, as it relates to online information collecting and sale, has consequences for broader community standards, and there is no one-size fits all approach to this issue. China must engage their own ethicists, community, government and technologists to develop a solution that works for China. Finally, globalization. Most of China's internet success has been within China, but as China begins to consider how it might attract users from outside its borders, it will need to consider dialing back the protections that have held foreign Internet companies at bay."

""Every generation is having fun with it," said Jon Alexis, partner in the fast-casual Malibu Poke in Dallas, which opened Nov. 28 with three kiosks that allow guests to save their order history and access them again through facial recognition. "It has exceeded my expectations.""

"Google's AlphaGo AI Go player has defeated Ke Jie, Go world champion, in the opening match of a three game series that will include matches with Jie on Thursday and Saturday. The win was by a narrow margin, but AlphaGo has been programmed to ensure victory, not to run up the score or devastate its opponent, so the margin by which it wins isn't necessarily a good indicator of how easy or hard it was for the computer player to win"

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")."

"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. "

"A New York Times deep-dive into a facial recognition AI tool sold to law enforcement agencies uncovered that the company has amassed more than three billion images. Those images are scraped from all corners of the internet from social media sites to companies' "About Us" pages.  That's way more than the typical police or even FBI database. "

"What really helps Trump is Facebook. Last October, it became clear that, whatever its collective remorse about the role it had played in Trump's election three years before, Mark Zuckerberg's company had quietly exempted advertising by parties and candidates from its regulations on truth and falsehood."

"The verdict against Haneen Hossam, Mowada al-Adham and three others came after they had posted footage on the video-sharing app TikTok. The ruling, which can be appealed, included a fine of 300,000 Egyptian pounds (£14,600) for each defendant."

"A record 54m tonnes of "e-waste" was generated worldwide in 2019, up 21% in five years, the UN's Global E-waste Monitor report found. The 2019 figure is equivalent to 7.3kg for every man, woman and child on Earth, though use is concentrated in richer nations. The amount of e-waste is rising three times faster than the world's population, and only 17% of it was recycled in 2019."

""We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls," said a slide from one internal presentation in 2019, seen by the Wall Street Journal. "Thirty-two per cent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse," a subsequent presentation reported in March 2020."

"The long-running issues of traceability, transparency and enforcement were colourfully illustrated in September 2017 when a group of investigators from the Basel Action Network (BAN) - a non-for-profit group that monitors compliance with the 1989 United Nations Basel Convention on the trade of hazardous wastes - attempted to learn where exactly Australia's e-waste was going. The group fitted 35 old CRT televisions, LED monitors and printers with GPS devices of a special make. Out of this sample the team quickly focused on the fate of three LCD screens dropped at Officeworks storefronts around the Brisbane metro area. Hayley Palmer, BAN's chief operating officer, was on the team that followed where they went afterwards. As the signals left the country, Palmer, her nine-month-old and a colleague tracked the monitors to a warehouse in Hong Kong and then on to an illegal dump-yard in a rural part of Thailand where they talked their way inside."

"He quit the same way he'd been given the job: through a WhatsApp message. He had neither a contract nor any documents regulating his employment. For Felipe, the plan to make a little quick money became a hellish experience. With TikTok's short-form video format, much of the audio that needed transcription was only a few seconds long. The payment, made in U.S. dollars, was supposed to be $14 for every hour of audio transcribed. Amassing the secondslong clips into an hour of transcribed audio took Felipe about 20 hours. That worked out to only about 70 cents per hour - or 3.85 Brazilian reals, about three-quarters of Brazil's minimum wage."

""Creating greater access to Apple genuine parts gives our customers even more choice if a repair is needed," said Jeff Williams, Apple's chief operating officer. "In the past three years, Apple has nearly doubled the number of service locations with access to Apple genuine parts, tools, and training, and now we're providing an option for those who wish to complete their own repairs.""

"The research concludes that mentally demanding tasks are more difficult to handle at home than when physically present at a workplace. Based on the chess players' performances, excessive use of homeworking can hurt productivity, the three researchers believe."

"That ties their hands in how they can treat content related to the killings, they say, and forces them to leave up some content they believe ought to be removed. "It's been a month since the massacre and mass graves in Bucha, but this event hasn't been even designated a 'violating event', let alone a hate crime," said one moderator, who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity. "On that same day there was a shooting in the US, with one fatality and two casualties, and this was declared a violating event within three hours.""

"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."

"So if we put those three findings together, what do we get? * Small groups of * ageing * right-wingers * on their desktop computers (because this study wasn't-couldn't be-carried out on mobile, only desktop) ..get their information from unreliable, partisan news sites. The study doesn't say whether they then go on to share it on Facebook or on their Twitter account grumpyboomer032945231, but it's not hard to imagine that's what happens. This isn't to let the search algorithms off the hook either, but does go to show that the real problem, as ever, lies with the humans."