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"Twitter claims a 90 percent accuracy rate for the clever techniques it uses to learn the gender of any given user. Glenn Fleishman reports on a the company's disconcerting new analytics tools, the research behind them, and how large a pinch of salt they come with."

"Rutgers University's new program also uses a "behavior observation tool," which monitors student browser activity throughout an active session. While this feature is intended to prevent students from using the Internet to cheat on exams, the power that this grants instructors is extremely invasive. If a student accidentally leaves a personal or embarrassing website in their browser during an online course, a ProctorTrack instructor might stumble upon their activity."

"The NSA uses laughably sloppy tools for deciding whether a target is a "US person" (a person in the USA, or an American citizen abroad). For example, people whose address books contain foreign persons are presumed by some analysts to be foreign. Likewise, people who post in "foreign" languages (the US has no official state language) are presumed by some analysts to be non-US persons."

"Regin is a tool capable of infecting and compromising entire networks, not just individual computers, as security companies Symantec and Kaspersky Labs detailed in their technical reports published on Sunday and Monday. It's not only a computer virus or malware, but also a toolkit or platform that can be used for different purposes, depending on the needs of the attackers. It can collect passwords, retrieve deleted files, and even take over entire networks and infrastructures, according to researchers. "

"Durumeric leads a team of researchers at the University of Michigan that has developed scanning software called ZMap. This tool can probe the whole public Internet in under an hour, revealing information about the roughly four billion devices online. The scan results can show which sites are vulnerable to particular security flaws. In the case of FREAK, a scan was used to measure the scale of the threat before the bug was publicly announced."

"Petya ransomware victims can now unlock infected computers without paying. An unidentified programmer has produced a tool that exploits shortfalls in the way the malware encrypts a file that allows Windows to start up. In notes put on code-sharing site Github, he said he had produced the key generator to help his father-in-law unlock his Petya-encrypted computer."

"The algorithmic manager seems to watch everything you do. Ride-hailing platforms track a variety of personalized statistics, including ride acceptance rates, cancellation rates, hours spent logged in to the app and trips completed. And they display selected statistics to individual drivers as motivating tools, like "You're in the top 10 percent of partners!" Uber uses the accelerometer in drivers' phones along with GPS and gyroscope to give them safe driving reports, tracking their performance in granular detail. One driver posted to a forum that a grade of 210 out of 247 "smooth accelerations" earned a "Great work!" from the boss."

"In the fawning media coverage of the Obama campaign's technological prowess, it did not occur to observers at the time to call this a startling invasion of privacy. And it wasn't, or at a very minimum, the privacy risks were arguably outweighed by the benefits. A tool like this could be the future of politics: door-to-door canvassing for the digital age, and a welcome antidote to impersonal broadcast TV ads or a welcome upgrade from getting a phone call from a stranger telling you to vote."

"The future of human flourishing depends upon facial recognition technology being banned before the systems become too entrenched in our lives."

"Rekognition indicated high confidence that 28 members of the current Congress were known arrestees. It was wrong in every case. The false positives disproportionately targeted racialized members of Congress. This, finally, has Congress's attention: members of Congress have sent some pointed questions to Amazon about its Rekognition tool and given them a deadline of Aug 20 to respond. They've also requested an immediate meeting with Jeff Bezos to discuss the topic in depth."

"EFF's Legal Director Corynne McSherry offers five lessons to keep in mind: 1. (Lots of) mistakes will be made: copyright takedowns result in the removal of tons of legitimate content. 2. Robots won't help: automated filtering tools like Content ID have been a disaster, and policing copyright with algorithms is a lot easier than policing "bad speech." 3. These systems need to be transparent and have due process. A system that allows for automated instant censorship and slow, manual review of censorship gives a huge advantage to people who want to abuse the system. 4. Punish abuse. The ability to censor other peoples' speech is no joke. If you're careless or malicious in your takedown requests, you should pay a consequence: maybe a fine, maybe being barred form using the takedown system. 5. Voluntary moderation quickly becomes mandatory. Every voluntary effort to stem copyright infringement has been followed by calls to make those efforts mandatory (and expand them)."

"The groundbreaking artificial intelligence system, developed by the AI-outfit DeepMind with Moorfields eye hospital NHS foundation trust and University College London, was capable of correctly referring patients with more than 50 different eye diseases for further treatment with 94% accuracy, matching or beating world-leading eye specialists."

"The platform's automated tools may have mistaken the visuals of the burning building for 9/11 footage, according to Vagelis Papalexakis, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, Riverside who studies machine learning used in similar systems."

"Amid mounting financial pressure, at least a dozen police forces are using or considering predictive analytics, despite warnings from campaigners that use of algorithms and "predictive policing" models risks locking discrimination into the criminal justice system."

"Depending on how legal decisions shake out, AI systems could become a valuable tool to assist creativity, a nuisance ripping off hard-working human musicians, or both."

"showing how they can create a 40cm x 40cm "patch" that fools a convoluted neural network classifier that is otherwise a good tool for identifying humans into thinking that a person is not a person -- something that could be used to defeat AI-based security camera systems. They theorize that the could just print the patch on a t-shirt and get the same result."

"Automatically produced texts use language models derived from statistical analysis of vast corpuses of human-generated text to produce machine-generated texts that can be very hard for a human to distinguish from text produced by another human. These models could help malicious actors in many ways, including generating convincing spam, reviews, and comments -- so it's really important to develop tools that can help us distinguish between human-generated and machine-generated texts."

"documenting a tool for fooling facial recognition software by shining hat-brim-mounted infrared LEDs on the user's face, projecting CCTV-visible, human-eye-invisible shapes designed to fool the face recognition software. "

""Robots are a great educational tool for children. It inspires them to learn about science and engineering," Sharkey told the Guardian in March. "But there are significant dangers in having robots mind our children. They do not have the sensitivity or understanding needed for childcare." "

"The algorithm, called Compas (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), is used throughout the US to weigh up whether defendants awaiting trial or sentencing are at too much risk of reoffending to be released on bail. Since being developed in 1998, the tool is reported to have been used to assess more than one million defendants. But a new paper has cast doubt on whether the software's predictions are sufficiently accurate to justify its use in potentially life-changing decisions."