Group items tagged

"Roblox to give parents more control over children's activity after warnings over grooming Parents will be able to see who children interact with and ensure they cannot play games with graphic violence as report accuses company of lax safety controls"

"Some of the same social media analyses that have helped Google and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spot warning signs of a flu outbreak could be used to detect the rumblings of violent conflict before it begins, scholars said in a paper released this week. Kenyan officials used essentially this system to track hate speech on Facebook, blogs and Twitter in advance of that nation's 2013 presidential election, which brought Uhuru Kenyatta to power."

"The Tesla Autopilot system registered that the SUV in front of the lead car was braking hard and the system recognized this as a major danger."

"Currently, the law treats machines as if they were all created equal, as simple consumer products. In most cases, when an accident occurs, standards of strict product liability law apply. In other words, unless a consumer uses a product in an outrageous way or grossly ignores safety warnings, the manufacturer is automatically considered at fault."

"Jaron Lanier, the author and inventor of the concept of virtual reality, warned that digital infrastructure was moving beyond human control. He said: "When you try to achieve great scale with automation and the automation exceeds the boundaries of human oversight, there is going to be failure. That goes for governments, for consumer companies, for Google, or a big insurance company. It is infuriating because it is driven by unreasonable greed. In many cases, the systems that tend to fail, fail because of an attempt to make them run automatically with a minimal amount of human oversight.""

"The app then measures 14 health parameters (Glucose, Protein, Urobilinogen, Calcium, Blood, Creatinine, pH, Ketone, Bilirubin, Specific Gravity, Nitrites, Leucocyte, Ascorbic Acid, Microalbumin) using routine urine analysis, provides day-to-day analytics, and, importantly, enables regular monitoring for early warning markers for more than 25 medical conditions, including complications of diabetes, pregnancy, kidney disease, and urinary tract infections. The whole idea is to spot risks early, and to address big problems before they become too big. This is important both for the home user, as well for the beneficiary of the low-cost clinic in the developing world. "

"More than 500 of the world's leading authors, including five Nobel prize winners, have condemned the scale of state surveillance revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and warned that spy agencies are undermining democracy and must be curbed by a new international charter."

"One of the most widely used tools for monitoring and restricting pupils' internet use in UK schools has a serious security flaw which could leave hundreds of thousands of children's personal information exposed to hackers, a researcher has warned."

"An Israeli company is trying to prove that augmented reality is not only the premise of video games, it can also save lives. iOnRoad is a new mobile application, developed by Picitup, that is "helping smartphone users make smarter driving decisions" by using a phone's camera and GPS."

"More than 150 artificial intelligence researchers have signed an open letter calling for future research in the field to focus on maximising the social benefit of AI, rather than simply making it more capable. The signatories, which include researchers from Oxford, Cambridge, MIT and Harvard as well as staff at Google, Amazon and IBM, celebrate progress in the field, but warn that "potential pitfalls" must be avoided."

"Cybersecurity experts have warned for years that malfeasance, technical breakdown or administrative incompetence could easily wreak havoc with electronic systems and could go largely or wholly undetected. This is a concern made much more urgent by Russia's cyber-attacks on political party servers and state voter registration databases in 2016 and by the risk of a repeat - or worse - in this November's midterms. "

"In a world of cloud computing, everything we do is governed by tens of thousands of words of legal fine-print (including the fine print that warned Mr da Silva that his movies might stop working if he changed the region associated with his Itunes account) that no one (including Mr da Silva, and you, and me) has ever, ever read (famously so!)."

"Critics of the government's flagship internet regulation policy are warning it could lead to a North Korean-style censorship regime, where regulators decide which websites Britons are allowed to visit, because of how broad the proposals are."

"I can't believe this has to be said (again), but cyberpunk was meant as a warning, not a business plan. It turns out that you need very few identifiers to make a guess about who a person standing in front of a billboard is, especially when you can suck data out of their phones. Throw in data about how long you stand in front of a billboard and you've got metrics that advertisers can use to tune their campaigns."

"Quest Diagnostics, one of the biggest blood testing providers in the country, warned Monday that nearly 12 million of its customers may have had personal, financial and medical information breached due to an issue with one of its vendors."