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Contents contributed and discussions participated by dr tech

dr tech

'Three black teenagers': anger as Google image search shows police mugshots | Technolog... - 0 views

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    "A simple Google image search highlighted on Twitter has been said to highlight the pervasiveness of racial bias and media profiling. "Three black teenagers" was a trending search on Google on Thursday after a US high school student pointed out the stark difference in results for "three black teenagers" and "three white teenagers"."
dr tech

'Alarming' rise in ransomware tracked - BBC News - 0 views

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    "There are now more than 120 separate families of ransomware, said experts studying the malicious software. Other researchers have seen a 3,500% increase in the criminal use of net infrastructure that helps run ransomware campaigns."
dr tech

DDoSers sell attacks for $5 on Fivver / Boing Boing - 0 views

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    "Now, researchers from Incapsula have delved into the world of cut-rate DDoS providers, who market their services for $5 a pop on the website Fiverr. The DDoSers figleaf their offerings by calling them "stress testers" that website owners can use to determine whether their sites are configured to handle lots of traffic, but as the Incapsula team found, most will cheerfully attack sites other than your own (though one vendor said he wouldn't attack "government state websites, hospitals"). "
dr tech

US nuclear arsenal controlled by 1970s computers with 8in floppy disks | Technology | T... - 0 views

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    "The US military's nuclear arsenal is controlled by computers built in the 1970s that still use 8in floppy disks. A report into the state of the US government, released by congressional investigators, has revealed that the country is spending around $60bn (£40.8bn) to maintain museum-ready computers, which many do not even know how to operate any more, as their creators retire."
dr tech

How Technology Hijacks People's Minds - from a Magician and Google's Design Ethicist - ... - 0 views

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    "By shaping the menus we pick from, technology hijacks the way we perceive our choices and replaces them with new ones. But the closer we pay attention to the options we're given, the more we'll notice when they don't actually align with our true needs."
dr tech

Reclaim the Internet research reveals huge scale of social media misogyny | Technology ... - 0 views

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    "To coincide with the launch, the campaign has released research by Demos revealing the huge scale of social media misogyny. The study monitored the use of the words "slut" and "whore" by UK Twitter users over three weeks from the end of April. It found that 6,500 individuals were targeted by 10,000 aggressive and misogynistic tweets in that period."
dr tech

Real time face capture lets you control famous faces / Boing Boing - 0 views

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    "Researchers at Stanford have developed face-capture technology that can alter pre-recorded videos in real-time on low cost computers. In other words, you can make George W Bush or Donald Trump appear intelligent. "
dr tech

Uber knows you're more likely to pay surge prices when your phone is dying - 0 views

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    "Uber knows when your phone battery is running low because its app collects that information in order to switch into power-saving mode. But Chen swears Uber would never use that knowledge to gouge you out of more money. "We absolutely don't use that to kind of like push you a higher surge price, but it's an interesting kind of psychological fact of human behavior," Chen said. Uber's surge pricing uses a proprietary algorithm that accounts for how many users are hailing rides in an area at a given time. Customers are apparently less willing to believe that when the multiplier is a round number like 2.0 or 3.0, which seems more like it could have been arbitrarily made up by a human."
dr tech

AI will create 'useless class' of human, predicts bestselling historian | Technology | ... - 0 views

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    "AIs do not need more intelligence than humans to transform the job market. They need only enough to do the task well. And that is not far off, Harari says. "Children alive today will face the consequences. Most of what people learn in school or in college will probably be irrelevant by the time they are 40 or 50. If they want to continue to have a job, and to understand the world, and be relevant to what is happening, people will have to reinvent themselves again and again, and faster and faster.""
dr tech

Chinese officials 'create 488m bogus social media posts a year' | World news | The Guar... - 0 views

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    "The Chinese government is fabricating almost 490m social media posts a year in order to distract the public from criticising or questioning its rule, according to a study. China's "Fifty Cent Party" - a legion of freelance online trolls so-named because they are believed to be paid 50 cents a post - has long been blamed for flooding the Chinese internet with pro-regime messages designed to defend and promote the ruling Communist party."
dr tech

Millions of hacked LinkedIn IDs advertised 'for sale' - BBC News - 0 views

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    "A hacker is advertising what he says is more than one hundred million LinkedIn logins for sale. The IDs were reportedly sourced from a breach four years ago, which had previously been thought to have included a fraction of that number. At the time, the business-focused social network said it had reset the accounts of those it thought had been compromised."
dr tech

Vietnam 'blocks' Facebook over the weekend due to protests over dead fish - 0 views

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    "So over the weekend, when protesters were expected to rally for the third time, Facebook was inaccessible to locals, who had been using the platform to organise. People also had problems accessing Facebook's Instagram service. Israeli VPN service Hola posted a statement saying it saw a surge of about 200,000 users from Vietnam on its system over the weekend, using it to access Facebook."
dr tech

Iraq shuts down the internet to stop pupils cheating in exams | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

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    "The blackouts coincided with exams for secondary and high-school students and were implemented as the ultimate step in the country's battle to stop students cheating using smuggled mobile phones and internet-connected devices in exam halls. While attempting to ban mobile phones from exams or setting up local jamming equipment might be a less draconian measure, shutting off the internet is undoubtedly efficient. However, the outage impacted every person and business in the parts of the country controlled by the Iraqi government, causing human rights campaigners, including Access Now, to condemn the move."
dr tech

Face recognition app taking Russia by storm may bring end to public anonymity | Technol... - 0 views

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    "Unlike other face recognition technology, their algorithm allows quick searches in big data sets. "Three million searches in a database of nearly 1bn photographs: that's hundreds of trillions of comparisons, and all on four normal servers. With this algorithm, you can search through a billion photographs in less than a second from a normal computer," said Kabakov, during an interview at the company's modest central Moscow office. The app will give you the most likely match to the face that is uploaded, as well as 10 people it thinks look similar."
dr tech

Algorithmic cruelty: when Gmail adds your harasser to your speed-dial / Boing Boing - 0 views

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    "It's not that Google wants to do this, it's that they didn't anticipate this outcome, and compounded that omission by likewise omitting a way to overrule the algorithm's judgment. As with other examples of algorithmic cruelty, it's not so much this specific example as was it presages for a future in which more and more of our external reality is determined by models derived from machine learning systems whose workings we're not privy to and have no say in. "
dr tech

Google using romance novels to train its artificial intelligence to write fiction - 0 views

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    "Google is using romance novels to teach its artificial intelligence (AI) system to better understand how people communicate. Researchers at Google Brain, the company's AI-focused deep learning project, presented a paper earlier this month that detailed techniques they used to teach its AI to write fiction - and the results were unexpectedly haunting."
dr tech

Computer science class fails to notice their TA was actually an AI chatbot - 0 views

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    "Meanwhile, Goel plans on bringing the chatbot to more schools and classes. While he doesn't see Jill completely replacing professors and assistants, he thinks giving more students the opportunity for one-on-one interactions - even if with an AI - will help keep them engaged in the coursework."
dr tech

Facebook news selection is in hands of editors not algorithms, documents show | Technol... - 0 views

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    "But the documents show that the company relies heavily on the intervention of a small editorial team to determine what makes its "trending module" headlines - the list of news topics that shows up on the side of the browser window on Facebook's desktop version. The company backed away from a pure-algorithm approach in 2014 after criticism that it had not included enough coverage of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in users' feeds."
dr tech

Woman 'live-streamed her own suicide on Periscope' - BBC News - 0 views

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    "An investigation into the death of a 19-year-old French woman who reportedly live-streamed herself taking her own life has opened in France. The woman, who had been using the smartphone app Periscope, reportedly jumped under a train at a station about 25 miles (40 km) south of Paris on Tuesday."
dr tech

It's time for tech companies to open up about the algorithms that shape our world - 0 views

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    "When Google's algorithms result in men on the Internet seeing better-paying job advertisements than women, it's worth looking under the hood at the assumptions that the algorithms, and the people behind it, have made. "
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