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Contents contributed and discussions participated by dr tech

dr tech

The disruption con: why big tech's favourite buzzword is nonsense | Silicon Valley | Th... - 0 views

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    "The answers to such questions will determine what regulatory oversight we believe is necessary or desirable, what role we think the government or unions should play in a new industry such as tech, and even how the industry and its titans ought to be discussed."
dr tech

The High Privacy Cost of a "Free" Website - The Markup - 0 views

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    "An array of free website-building tools, many offered by ad-tech and ad-funded companies, has led to a dizzying number of trackers loading on users' browsers, even when they visit sites where privacy would seem paramount, an investigation by The Markup has found. Some load without the website operators' explicit knowledge-or disclosure to users."
dr tech

Uluru "removed" from Google Street View | Boing Boing - 0 views

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    "The images to be removed-as of posting time they are still accessible, with Google saying it may take some time to update-are user-submitted 360-degree views which allow visitors to Google Maps to virtually explore the monument on "foot"."
dr tech

In facial recognition challenge, top-ranking algorithms show bias against Black women |... - 0 views

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    "The results are unfortunately not surprising - countless studies have shown that facial recognition is susceptible to bias. A paper last fall by University of Colorado, Boulder researchers demonstrated that AI from Amazon, Clarifai, Microsoft, and others maintained accuracy rates above 95% for cisgender men and women but misidentified trans men as women 38% of the time."
dr tech

Facebook says it may quit Europe over ban on sharing data with US | Facebook | The Guar... - 0 views

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    ""In the event that [Facebook] were subject to a complete suspension of the transfer of users' data to the US," Yvonne Cunnane argued, "it is not clear … how, in those circumstances, it could continue to provide the Facebook and Instagram services in the EU." Facebook denied the filing was a threat, arguing in a statement that it was a simple reflection of reality. "Facebook is not threatening to withdraw from Europe," a spokesperson said."
dr tech

Facebook suspends environmental groups despite vow to fight misinformation | Climate ch... - 0 views

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    "Facebook has suspended the accounts of several environmental organizations less than a week after launching an initiative it said would counter a tide of misinformation over climate science on the platform. Groups such as Greenpeace USA, Climate Hawks Vote and Rainforest Action Network were among those blocked from posting or sending messages on Facebook over the weekend. Activists say hundreds of other individual accounts linked to indigenous, climate and social justice groups were also suspended for an alleged "intellectual property rights violation"."
dr tech

Chinese cameras blacklisted by US being used in UK school toilets | Surveillance | The ... - 0 views

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    ""The concern is, are the Chinese extra-territorialising their surveillance state? You could make a case that they are when other countries are using technologies like Hikvision that they use on their own citizens. They can now do globally," said James Lewis, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. Hikvision has rebutted those concerns and said there is no evidence that surveillance collected in other countries using its cameras has ever been sent to Beijing."
dr tech

Twitter apologises for 'racist' image-cropping algorithm | Twitter | The Guardian - 0 views

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    "But users began to spot flaws in the feature over the weekend. The first to highlight the issue was PhD student Colin Madland, who discovered the issue while highlighting a different racial bias in the video-conference software Zoom. When Madland, who is white, posted an image of himself and a black colleague who had been erased from a Zoom call after its algorithm failed to recognise his face, Twitter automatically cropped the image to only show Madland."
dr tech

Instagram at 10: how sharing photos has entertained us, upset us - and changed our sens... - 0 views

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    "Instagram turned our phones into adult pacifiers. At first, this was a tranquillising reel of pretty pictures, pumped in a steady stream with each thumb-swipe. Like a warm milky drink, but of sunsets and puppies and toes in the sand. Later, and more insidiously, the dopamine hit shifted to refreshing your feed to see how many likes your own pictures had. Either way, we had got ourselves in a feedback loop of attention-seeking in which our emotions were channelled from our brains to our phones and back again. Twitter is about your tribe, Facebook is about home and family, but Instagram is a romance between just you and your phone."
dr tech

Another day not at the office: will working from home be 2020's most radical change? | ... - 0 views

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    "Remote working changes not just our understanding of a working community and the company ethos, but also our very concept of physical reality. Suddenly, to misappropriate Gertrude Stein, there is no there there. But if there is no shared space, what's to stop employers following the example of many customer-care call centres, and employ much cheaper staff based in the developing world?"
dr tech

Rescuing Restaurants: How to Protect Restaurants, Workers, and Communities from Predato... - 0 views

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    "What the apps have done, instead of competing to serve customers and restaurants, is use Wall Street money to accumulate market power, raise barriers to entry, and then merge with each other and set up regional monopolies.The people who have invested tens of billions of dollars in the four dominant delivery apps tolerate huge short-term losses purely because they see the likelihood of monopoly power"
dr tech

Amazon's Vector power smart meter deal puts 'how you live your life' on web giant's ser... - 0 views

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    ""This is all identifiable in the smart meter data - it has literally your entire the pattern of life and behaviour through just monitoring where you live and what you do in your home." Vector and AWS say the data is anonymised and cannot be linked back to customers. Privacy advocates dispute that, because the way some customers use power in certain locations will easily identify them. For the companies, it's a tightrope: the more anonymous the data is made, the less value it has overall."
dr tech

What Are Geofence Warrants? - The Markup - 0 views

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    "Geofence warrants, or reverse-location warrants, are a fairly new concept. With permission from a judge, they allow law enforcement to obtain anonymized data from Google from almost any device that was in a certain geographic area at a specific time. Police can then go back to Google for more specific user information on anyone they deem a suspect."
dr tech

From viral conspiracies to exam fiascos, algorithms come with serious side effects | Co... - 0 views

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    "And that was a genuine first - the only time I can recall when an algorithmic decision had been challenged in public protests that were powerful enough to prompt a government climbdown. In a world increasingly - and invisibly - regulated by computer code, this uprising might look like a promising precedent."
dr tech

YouTube's Plot to Silence Conspiracy Theories | WIRED - 0 views

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    "Crucial to his success, he says, was YouTube's recommendation system, the feature that promotes videos for you to watch on the homepage or in the "Up Next" column to the right of whatever you're watching. "We were recommended constantly," he tells me. YouTube's algorithms, he says, figured out that "people getting into flat earth apparently go down this rabbit hole, and so we're just gonna keep recommending.""
dr tech

Burglars beware: tech pioneers aim to make South Africa's townships safer | Global deve... - 0 views

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    "Jonga - the innovative township community alarm system launched by Mgiba and Shezi earlier this year - combines a wireless motion sensor with a six-month battery life and a 100-decibel siren with an Android app that sends text messages to five pre-selected contacts when the alarm is triggered."
dr tech

Working from home was fine for 6 months. Now it's not - 0 views

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    "Although a few companies (tech firms, largely) have decided that work from home is a long-term solution, others are realizing that simply won't work for them. JPMorgan says its internal data show workers are not as productive from home. The result is a decision to make the investments to bring people back as safely as possible in this new normal. "
dr tech

Tesla driver found asleep at wheel of self-driving car doing 150km/h | Canada | The Gua... - 0 views

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    ""Although manufacturers of new vehicles have built-in safeguards to prevent drivers from taking advantage of the new safety systems in vehicles, those systems are just that - supplemental safety systems," RCMP superintendent Gary Graham said in the statement. "They are not self-driving systems. They still come with the responsibility of driving.""
dr tech

YouTube viewers to help uncover how users are sent to harmful videos | YouTube | The Gu... - 0 views

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    "YouTube viewers are being asked to become "watchdogs" and record their use of the site to help uncover the ways in which its recommendation algorithm can lead to online radicalisation."
dr tech

Sweden: man goes on trial for 2004 murder after DNA matched to genealogy site | Sweden ... - 0 views

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    "The case was finally cracked when new legislation in January 2019 allowed police to search for matches to suspects' DNA on commercial genealogy websites, which are popular among Swedes seeking long-lost relatives."
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