"As privacy scholar Josh Fairfield says, while some dismiss privacy concerns by saying they have nothing to hide, we shouldn't accept that argument from anyone wearing clothes. Or anyone who closes the bathroom door, locks her home or car, or uses password-protected accounts. Or anyone who benefits from rules and norms that protect secrecy and confidentiality, prohibit government overreach, and give us recourse if others intrude upon our seclusion, publicly disclose embarrassing private facts, depict us in a false light, or appropriate our image or likeness. "

"The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, should be a required reading for every head of state. What took 17 years to be written and transformed the whole world, takes only a few days to read it. Right in the first page Smith asserts that the wealth of "every nation… [is] regulated by two different circumstances; first by the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which its labour is generally applied; and, secondly, by the proportion between the number of those who are employed in useful labour,""

""History sniffing" promises a nose full of dust or, you're talking about web browsers, a whiff of the websites you've visited. And that may be enough to compromise your privacy and expose data that allows miscreants to target you more effectively with tailored attacks. For example, a phishing gambit that attempts to simulate your bank login page has a better chance of success if it presents the web page for a bank where you actually have an account."

"His software is not labeled anything as grand as artificial intelligence. It's machine learning, facilitating and extending his own words, his own imagination. At one level, it merely helps him do what fledgling writers have always done - immerse themselves in the works of those they want to emulate. Hunter Thompson, for instance, strived to write in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, so he retyped "The Great Gatsby" several times as a shortcut to that objective."

"Nemitz identifies four bases of digital power which create and then reinforce its unhealthy concentration in too few hands: lots of money, which means influence; control of "infrastructures of public discourse"; collection of personal data and profiling of people; and domination of investment in AI, most of it a "black box" not open to public scrutiny. The key question is which of the challenges of AI "can be safely and with good conscience left to ethics" and which need law. Nemitz sees much that needs law."

"More than 10m tweets sent by state actors attempting to influence US politics have been released to the public, forming one of the largest archives of political misinformation ever collated. The database reveals the astonishing extent of two misinformation campaigns, which spent more than five years sowing discord in the US and had spillover effects in other national campaigns, including Britain's EU referendum."

"The president of Baidu, Ya-Qin Zhang, said in a statement: "As AI technology keeps advancing and the application of AI expands, we recognise the importance of joining the global discussion around the future of AI. Ensuring AI's safety, fairness and transparency should not be an afterthought but rather highly considered at the onset of every project or system we build.""

"Tech workers are in demand: companies find it easier to raise cash than to hire engineers; this gives workers enormous bargaining power, and they're using it. From the Google uprisings over a Pentagon babykiller project and a Chinese surveillance project to the Microsoft uprising over ICE contracts, tech workers are emerging as part of the solution -- while their secretive, shareholder-haunted bosses are more and more the problem."

"Microsoft has pulled its latest Windows 10 update offline after some users complained of missing files. It's the latest in a string of incidents with regular patches and Microsoft's larger Windows 10 updates that have been causing issues for some PC users this year. While Microsoft tests Windows 10 with millions of beta testers, there are signs that this public feedback loop isn't always working. Earlier this year Microsoft delayed its April 2018 Windows 10 update due to last minute Blue Screen of Death issues, and then had to fix desktop and Chrome freezing issues after it was shipped to more than 600 million machines. "

"california has banned bots that pretend to be human. under a newly signed bill, these bots will need to disclose their nature, making it clear to the user that they're conversing with a machine rather than a human.    according to a bill signed on friday by democratic gov. jerry brown, automated accounts, more commonly called 'bots', will need to disclose to customers that they're not real humans, according to reporting from PC magazine. the bill is part of a move that will help users avoid falling victim to automated messages selling goods or services in a commercial transaction or to influence a vote in an election."

"Until around an hour and a half after the award was announced on Tuesday, the Canadian physicist Donna Strickland was not deemed significant enough to merit her own page on the user-edited encyclopedia. The oversight has once again highlighted the marginalization of women in science and gender bias at Wikipedia."

"The articles were so widely and quickly shared that they triggered Facebook's spam filters, which blocked the most popular stories about the breach, including an AP story and a Guardian story. There's no reason to think that Facebook intentionally suppressed embarrassing news about its own business. Rather, this is a cautionary tale about the consequences of content filtering on big platforms."

"The app, using Solid's decentralized technology, allows Berners-Lee to access all of his data seamlessly-his calendar, his music library, videos, chat, research. It's like a mashup of Google Drive, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Spotify, and WhatsApp."

"Three software flaws in Facebook's systems allowed hackers to break into user accounts, including those of the top executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, according to two people familiar with the investigation but not allowed to discuss it publicly. Once in, the attackers could have gained access to apps like Spotify, Instagram and hundreds of others that give users a way to log into their systems through Facebook."

"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)."

"FOLLOW US Twitter / Facebook / RSS Machine learning image classifiers use context clues to help understand the contents of a room, for example, if they manage to identify a dining-room table with a high degree of confidence, that can help resolve ambiguity about other objects nearby, identifying them as chairs. The downside of this powerful approach is that it means machine learning classifiers can be confounded by confusing, out-of-context elements in a scene, as is demonstrated in The Elephant in the Room, a paper from a trio of Toronto-based computer science academics."

"The Future of Jobs Report arrives as the rising tide of automation is expected to displace millions of American workers in the long term and as corporations, educational institutions and elected officials grapple with a global technological shift that may leave many people behind. The report, published Monday, envisions massive changes in the worldwide workforce as businesses expand the use of artificial intelligence and automation in their operations. Machines account for 29 percent of the total hours worked in major industries, compared with 71 percent performed by people. By 2022, however, the report predicts that 42 percent of task hours will be performed by machines and 58 percent by people"

"When Vancouver tech retailer NCIX went bankrupt, it stopped paying its bills, including the bills for the storage where its servers were being kept; that led to the servers being auctioned off without being wiped first, containing sensitive data -- addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, passwords, etc -- for thousands of customers. Also on the servers: tax and payroll information for the company's employees."