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""Employers are increasingly exploiting metadata logged by software and devices for performance analytics and algorithmic control," Christl added. "MS is providing the tools for it. Practices we know from software development (and factories and call centres) are expanded to all white-collar work.""

"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."

"Twitter suffered a major security breach on Wednesday that saw hackers take control of the accounts of major public figures and corporations, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Apple. The company confirmed the breach Wednesday evening, more than six hours after the hack began, and attributed it to a "coordinated social engineering attack" on its own employees that enabled the hackers to access "internal systems and tools"."

"Most people who use AI-powered translation tools do so for commonplace, relatively unimportant tasks like understanding a single phrase or quote. Those basic services won't do for an enterprise offering technical documents in 15 languages - but Lengoo's custom machine translation models might just do the trick. And with a new $20 million B round, they may be able to build a considerable lead. The translation business is a big one, in the billions, and isn't going anywhere. It's simply too common a task to need to release a document, piece of software or live website in multiple languages - perhaps dozens."

"My job was to use technology to make the low-level content moderators' work more efficient. For example, we created a tool that allowed them to throw a video clip into our database and search for similar content. When I was at ByteDance, we received multiple requests from the bases to develop an algorithm that could automatically detect when a Douyin user spoke Uyghur, and then cut off the livestream session. The moderators had asked for this because they didn't understand the language. Streamers speaking ethnic languages and dialects that Mandarin-speakers don't understand would receive a warning to switch to Mandarin."

"Robots have been slow to appear because each one requires a rare confluence of market, task, technology, and innovation. (And luck. I only described some of the things that nearly killed Roomba.) But as technology advances and costs decline, the toolbox for robot designers constantly expands. Thus, more types of robots will cross the threshold of economic viability. Still, we can expect one constant. Each new, successful robot will represent a minimum-the simplest, lowest-cost solution to a problem people want solved. The growing set of tools that let us attack ever more interesting problems make this an exciting time to practice robotics."

"Data collection-as Parscale's comment suggested-is perhaps the most powerful thing the Trump 2020 app does. On signing up, users are required to provide a phone number for a verification code, as well as their full name, email address, and zip code. They are also highly encouraged to share the app with their existing contacts. This is part of a campaign strategy for reaching the 40 to 50 million citizens expected to vote for Trump's reelection: to put it bluntly, the campaign says it intends to collect every single one of these voters' cell-phone numbers. This strategy means the app also makes extensive permission requests, asking for access to location data, phone identity, and control over the handset's Bluetooth function."

"The Singapore government says the wearable device it is developing for COVID-19 contact tracing will not have GPS, internet, or cellular connectivity, so data it collects can only be extracted when it is physically handed over to a health official. These details are being offered up as the government looks to ease concerns about data privacy and drive the adoption of digital tools that can help speed up contact tracing. "

"The Authenticator analyzes videos or images and tells users the percentage chance that they've been artificially manipulated. For videos, the tool can even analyze individual frames in real time."

"The tool tracks every click and interaction by employees and presents managers with leaderboards showing relative "productivity" of each employee, down to how many mentions they get in workplace emails."

"As Americans continue to grapple with media distrust, conspiracy theories, bots, trolls, and general panic amid multiple unprecedented crises, Twitter is once again trying a new method of identifying misinformation. A new feature in development at the social media platform, called "Birdwatch," was first reported by reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong (h/t Tech Crunch) in early August. "

"We are inured to the idea that professional environments have a built-in layer of surveillance, and now that this environment has merged with the home for many workers, some of these practices have started to look more extreme. But the discussion about surveillance should not start and end with the tools employers use to monitor people working from home. We should instead be asking: how necessary is any of this?"

""Our job as teachers and professors is not to surveil and police our students, but it's to educate them," he says. "You are assuming that students are trying to cheat-rather than assuming students are trying to learn and help them learn." He sees the growing adoption of automated proctoring tools as a continuation of a trend started by plagiarism-detection services like Turnitin, which he says were built on the assumption that students want to cheat and must be policed. But despite early pushback by students and some professors, plagiarism detection has become ubiquitous. Parry worries the same thing could happen with automated proctoring."

"But it isn't. As I write, I have a Fairphone 3+ on the desk beside me. It's a very capable, nicely designed, dual-sim Android phone. In just seconds, I snap off the back of the case with a fingernail and remove the battery. Other modules of the phone, including the camera, can be removed and replaced without elaborate tools or expertise. And once it's done you snap the case shut and press the power button. And you can buy it online for £399. Over in the US, the Framework laptop has just come on to the market. It's a thin, lightweight, high-performance 13.5in notebook that can be upgraded, customised and repaired in ways that no other notebook can. It's even available as a kit of modules that users can change and assemble themselves, installing only the modules they want as plug-in units. Think of it as Lego for geeks."

"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."

""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 flaw, dubbed "Log4Shell", may be the worst computer vulnerability discovered in years. It was uncovered in an open-source logging tool that is ubiquitous in cloud servers and enterprise software used across the industry and the government. Unless it is fixed, it grants criminals, spies and programming novices alike, easy access to internal networks where they can loot valuable data, plant malware, erase crucial information and much more."

"Two authors have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the company behind the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, claiming that the organisation breached copyright law by "training" its model on novels without the permission of authors. Mona Awad, whose books include Bunny and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, and Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World, filed the class action complaint to a San Francisco federal court last week."

"This all presents big questions for which we don't yet have answers. "At what point should kids know better?" asked David Dockterman, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "When should a person's 'permanent digital record' start recording, if ever? To what extent should social media be a space for trial-and-error exploration around identity and social behavior?" "These are fantastically difficult moral dilemmas for teenagers who act impulsively, using tools that are not fully under their control, leading to consequences that perhaps none of us can anticipate," said Sonia Livingstone, professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "This is the first time we've had a society in which almost by default, everything is recorded and shared and aggregated in ways that create a lifelong profile. Children should have the right to make mistakes.""