"Blockchain technology has also opened the way to new models whereby endless micropayments can be made in return for particular online services or content; and, if people voluntarily allow elements of their data to be used, rewards can flow the other way. Here perhaps lies the key to a system beyond the current, Google-led model, in which services appear to be free but the letting-go of personal data is the actual price."

"Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was "bots masquerading as people," a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube's systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event "the Inversion.""

"Researchers are becoming so adept at mining information from genealogical, medical and police genetic databases that it is becoming difficult to protect anyone's privacy-even those who have never submitted their DNA for analysis."

Ahhh ITGS group - a great discussion on the evoting problem would have been perfect for your Paper 2. "Remember: all of these principles of security, anonymity and verifiability have to be achieved in an understandable way. If they can't be then you get the opportunity for losers to claim fraud, and their supporters to believe them."

"Proponents say that it's more than just a matter of probability. The laws of physics don't seem that different from code in a program, according to some, and it's likely that with enough time, a sufficiently advanced civilization could crunch the numbers and produce a simulation that mimics the existence and behavior of every particle in our universe."

"Vietnam has introduced a new cybersecurity law, which criminalises criticising the government online and forces internet providers to give authorities' user data when requested, sparking claims of a "totalitarian" crackdown on dissent. The law, which mirrors China's draconian internet rules, came into effect on 1 January and forces internet providers to censor content deemed "toxic" by the ruling communist government. Vietnam's ministry of public security said it will tackle "hostile and reactionary forces", but human rights groups said it was authorities' latest method of silencing free speech."

"The uniforms allow school officials, teachers, and parents to keep track of the exact times that students leave or enter the school, Lin Zongwu, principal of the No. 11 School of Renhuai in Guizhou Province, told the state-run newspaper Global Times on Dec. 20. If students skip school without permission, an alarm will be triggered. If students try to game the system by swapping uniforms, an alarm also will sound, as facial-recognition equipment stationed at the school entrance can match a student's face with the chip embedded in the uniform."

"After a successful phishing attack that captured over 50 accounts, hackers stole 500,000 records from the San Diego Unified School District, for staff, current students, and past students going all the way back to 2008; including SSNs, home addresses and phone numbers, disciplinary files, health information, emergency contact details, health benefits and payroll info, pay information, financial data for direct deposits."

"The researchers, Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, and Timo Aila, came up with a new way of constructing a generative adversarial network, or GAN. GANs employ two dueling neural networks to train a computer to learn the nature of a data set well enough to generate convincing fakes. When applied to images, this provides a way to generate often highly realistic fakery. The same Nvidia researchers have previously used the technique to create artificial celebrities (read our profile of the inventor of GANs, Ian Goodfellow)."

"People in Soho, Piccadilly Circus, and Leicester Square are being told by the London Metropolitan Police to submit to a trial of the force's notoriously inaccurate, racially biased facial recognition system, which clocks in an impressive error-rate of 98% (the system has been decried by Professor Paul Wiles, the British biometrics commissioner, as an unregulated mess)."

"The Facebook data, which captured the engagement metrics on thousands of posts by the six major party leaders in the two months leading up to the election, was collected by academics at the University of Pisa's MediaLab. It reveals all of the 25 most shared Facebook posts in the two months leading up to the election were videos, live broadcasts or photos from either Salvini, who runs the far-right League, or Di Maio, the leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S)."

"pledging to fix the company's problems, but instead 2018 turned into 12 months of mea culpas, self-inflicted scandals, and screwups."

"This affects all of us every single day. When the algorithms that govern increasingly large parts of our lives have been designed almost exclusively by young bro-grammers with homogeneous experiences and worldviews, those algorithms are going to fail significant sections of society. A heartbreaking example of this is Gillian Brockell's experience of continuing to get targeted by pregnancy-related ads on Facebook after the stillbirth of her son. Brockell, a Washington Post journalist, recently made headlines when she tweeted an open letter to big tech companies, imploring them to think more carefully about how they target parenting ads."

"The use of facial recognition software is rising at public events. Ticketmaster has invested in startup Blink Identity, which aims to move fans through entry points more efficiently and combat touting. Israeli artificial intelligence company AnyVision said it was working with an undisclosed London arena to reduce bottlenecks at turnstiles."

"The social network, which did not oppose the application, has until mid-January to comply. The parody accounts, @Wetherspoon__UK and @SpoonsTom, have tens of thousands of followers each on the social network, and tweet a mixture of fake updates about Wetherspoon's pubs and replies to users who mistakenly believe they are contacting the real company."

"And, of course, there's the law-enforcement angle. Instead of relying on sketch artists and police lineups, a real-life version of a Recaller could tap into a witness's memory and reconstruct what they saw. Forget security-camera footage - cops just need your thoughts."

"Hassabis was a child chess prodigy, who learned the game aged four and was able to beat his dad three weeks later - indeed, when he started playing competitively he was so small he had to bring a pillow with him to reach the board - and became a strong player. Yet in AlphaZero's case there was no human input, other than telling it the rules of each game. "In a matter of a few hours it was superhuman," Hassabis says proudly."

"At the heart of the problem that troubles Ming is the training that computer engineers receive and their uncritical faith in AI. Too often, she says, their approach to a problem is to train a neural network on a mass of data and expect the result to work fine. She berates companies for failing to engage with the problem first - applying what is already known about good employees and successful students, for example - before applying the AI."

"The founders of Predictim want to be clear with me: Their product-an algorithm that scans the online footprint of a prospective babysitter to determine their "risk" levels for parents-is not racist. It is not biased. "We take ethics and bias extremely seriously," Sal Parsa, Predictim's CEO, tells me warily over the phone. "In fact, in the last 18 months we trained our product, our machine, our algorithm to make sure it was ethical and not biased. We took sensitive attributes, protected classes, sex, gender, race, away from our training set. We continuously audit our model. And on top of that we added a human review process.""

"But researchers at New York University's AI Now Institute have issued a strong warning against not only ubiquitous facial recognition, but its more sinister cousin: so-called affect recognition, technology that claims it can find hidden meaning in the shape of your nose, the contours of your mouth, and the way you smile. If that sounds like something dredged up from the 19th century, that's because it sort of is."