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"Before we go deeper, it's important to note that there are two approaches to facial - or any biometric - authentication: "match on server" and "match on device." The former approach shares some of the risky aspects of facial recognition technology because it stores the details of one's most personal features-your face or your fingerprint-on a server, which is inherently insecure. There are some well-publicized examples of biometric databases being hacked, which is why so many companies are committing to only do on-device biometrics."

"an attempt to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic, at least 30 governments around the world have instituted temporary or indefinite efforts to single out infected individuals or maintain quarantines. Many of these efforts, in turn, undermine personal privacy."

""This database has to be updated every 28 days, so you can see how much of a chore this has to be for an engineer to visit," Lomas said, pointing out the floppy drive - which in normal operations is tucked away behind a locked panel."

"'I don't think the security agencies will be using this technology any time soon. 'They're more interested in encryption for digital files.  'There isn't much need for the destruction of hard-copy documents any more.'"

"Physicist creates AI algorithm that may prove reality is a simulation"

"As with most items and products that are re-engineered with the Internet of Things (IoT), they become even more powerful and useful in our daily lives. With the Internet of Things becoming an integral part of many industries, let's explore how this technology is changing the design and function of modern vehicles."

"Ah, but isn't creativity a slippery concept - something that's hard to define but that we nevertheless recognise when we see it? That hasn't stopped psychologists from trying to measure it, though, via tools such as the alternative uses test and the similar Torrance test. And it turns out that one LLM - GPT-4 - beats 91% of humans on the former and 99% of them on the latter. So as the inveterate artificial intelligence user Ethan Mollick puts it: "We are running out of creativity tests that AIs cannot ace.""

"Twitter stands a 50% chance of a major outage that could take the site offline during the World Cup, according to a recently departed employee with knowledge of how the company responds to large-scale events. The former employee, who was granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of what was discussed, has knowledge of the workings of Twitter Command Centre, the platform's team of troubleshooters who monitor the site for issues such as traffic spikes and data centre outages."

"One of the beautiful things about the internet is the sheer amount of knowledge it contains: if you're interested in any topic, you can find a surfeit of information about it in an instant. But this can also have a downside. Search engines can end perpetuating bias, for example. And research by Adrian Ward from the University of Texas, Austin suggests that we can mistake information we've searched for as our own knowledge. Now, in a new paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Ward and colleagues have found that sharing information online also makes us feel that our knowledge has increased - even if we haven't read it."

"The Italian supreme court ordered prosecutors last month to disclose how the Sky ECC data had been retrieved, arguing that it was impossible to have a fair trial if the accused is unable to access the evidence or assess its reliability and legality, a position supposed by the NGO Fair Trials. Whether prosecutors choose to do so could determine whether the arrests made this week lead to convictions or not. Prosecutors in the UK face a similar dilemma in relation to the hacking of EncroChat, another secret messaging platform that had the added facility of a "panic" button that when pressed would immediately erase the phone's contents."

"I don't trust it, David! It's the whole Lord of the Rings vibe - "one app to rule them all", which famously didn't work out great for Middle-earth. A lot of people have concerns, myself included. It's why there was a backlash to Meta - which provides Facebook and WhatsApp - trying to launch a digital currency. I think there's a broader issue of digital literacy here: when we give up our permissions to a super app, do we really know what we're agreeing to?"

"Elon Musk's Twitter is leaning heavily on automation to moderate content according to the company's new head of trust and safety, amid a reported surge in hate speech on the social media platform. Ella Irwin has told the Reuters news agency that Musk, who acquired the company in October, was focused on using automation more, arguing that Twitter had in the past erred on the side of using time and labour-intensive human reviews of harmful content."

"In some sense, GPT is like a glorified version of cut and paste, where everything that is cut goes through a paraphrasing/synonymy process before it is paste but together-and a lot of important stuff is sometimes lost along the way. When GPT sounds plausible, it is because every paraphrased bit that it pastes together is grounded in something that actual humans said, and there is often some vague (but often irrelevant) relationship between.. At least for now, it still takes a human to know which plausible bits actually belong together."

"As it turns out, the best way to beat YouTube horrid algorithm (and protect yourself from accidentally getting radicalized by some Antisemitic Flat-Earth Groomer bullshit) is to simply not interact with the platform, except to watch the video you went there to watch."

"Google should know better, given that it already had a "hallucination problem" with its featured snippets(Opens in a new tab) at the top of search results back in 2017. The snippets algorithm seemed to particularly enjoy telling lies about U.S. presidents. Again, what could go wrong?"

"A third of social media users aged between eight and 17 have the online age of an adult because they sign up with a false date of birth, according to new research. The fake age issue means that young users in the UK are at greater risk of being exposed to harmful or adult content, as platforms presume they are older than they in fact are."

"As we pass back through the factory, something catches my eye: a pallet of TV screens from a major manufacturer, still neatly boxed and plastic-wrapped. They are brand new, but here to be shredded: "They don't want this product resold and competing against their new products, so they want it all destroyed." I'd expected to see this at ERI, but not so brazenly. Manufacturers and retailers routinely destroy returns and unsold items, known as deadstock, en masse. As Kyle Wiens, founder of the repair chain iFixit, tells me, these "must-shred" contracts are the "dirty secret" of the recycling industry. ("The recyclers are desperate for manufacturer contracts, so they'll do anything and keep their mouths shut," Wiens says.) In 2021, for instance, an ITV News investigation in the UK found Amazon was sending millions of new and returned items a year to be destroyed. (Amazon says it has since stopped the practice.)"

"Now researchers have taken a step forward by combining fMRI's ability to monitor neural activity with the predictive power of artificial intelligence language models. The hybrid technology has resulted in a decoder that can reproduce, with a surprising level of accuracy, the stories that a person listened to or imagined telling in the scanner. The decoder could even guess the story behind a short film that someone watched in the scanner, though with less accuracy."

"n a way, though, that's still the same phenomenon: the people in those situations lost boomerangs and Roman concrete because they didn't care anymore. They had more pressing concerns. So: loss of technology is not impossible. But to an innovative and large culture like modern human civilization, it's not really something that happens. It's just a fun trope for stories. Let's hope it remains that way."