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"TikTok has already come under fire for its data collection, and this is just another step in yet another app collecting information on its users and doing whatever it pleases with it. It seems being online in 2022 is becoming more and more difficult to do while maintaining some semblance of privacy and data autonomy."

"In 2015, a research group fed an AI system called Deep Patient health and medical data from some 700,000 people, and tested whether it could predict diseases. It could, but Deep Patient provides no explanation for the basis of a diagnosis, and the researchers have no idea how it comes to its conclusions. A doctor either can either trust or ignore the computer, but that trust will remain blind."

"Virgin Hyperloop One announced its plan to build a $500 million certification center to advance its vision of the future of high-speed transportation in West Virginia. The state will serve as a locus for testing, developing, and validating the technology that underpins the still-theoretical hyperloop system. "

"But with all of the successes of AI, it's also important to pay attention to when, and how, it can go wrong, in order to prevent future errors. A recent paper by Roman Yampolskiy, director of the Cybersecurity Lab at the University of Louisville, outlines a history of AI failures which are "directly related to the mistakes produced by the intelligence such systems are designed to exhibit." According to Yampolskiy, these types of failures can be attributed to mistakes during the learning phase or mistakes in the performance phase of the AI system."

"Excluding mobile operating systems for tablets and smartphones, Windows still owns about 90% of the global computing market, so it's no surprise it remains a prime target for malware. That doesn't mean other operating systems are perfectly safe, however, as they too can prove easy pickings."

"GCHQ, the UK's spy agency, designed a security protocol for voice-calling called MIKEY-SAKKE and announced that they'll only certify VoIP systems as secure if they use MIKEY-SAKKE, and it's being marketed as "government-grade security." But a close examination of MIKEY-SAKKE reveals some serious deficiencies. The system is designed from the ground up to support "key escrow" -- that is, the ability of third parties to listen in on conversations without the callers knowing about it."

"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."

"The facial recognition system is currently being rolled out across six of Prof Shen's classes. "The new system saves time and reduces the workload of students," Prof Shen told the Beijing News. "Out of one hundred students, it usually only fails to recognise one student." But obviously, not everyone is a fan."

"Now they might finally get this thanks to a new $10 million contract the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched to design and build a secure voting system that it hopes will be impervious to hacking."

"Artificial intelligence researchers have developed a mosquito early warning system that raises the alarm when the insects are near by detecting the whine of their wingbeats. The system uses an app that can run on a £20 mobile phone to analyse sounds in the environment and issue a warning if it hears the telltale buzz as a mosquito swoops past."

"Oliver also pointed to a Finnish man who once found "one of the most severe security flaws ever discovered in a voting system" in US machines and alerted their manufacturers, who released a patch to fix the problem in 2006. The state of Georgia, however, never installed it, and the Senate report noted their machines hadn't been updated since at least 2005. "They'd essentially been hitting the 'remind me tomorrow' button on a critical security update for over a decade," Oliver explained, "meaning Georgia's election systems operate on the same level of technical proficiency as Every Dad"."

"They then analysed how diverse the individuals' work was at different points in their careers. This was assessed using an artificial intelligence system that was trained, in the case of art, to "recognise" different styles by features such as the brush strokes, shapes and objects in a piece, while in the case of film, it was trained to classify a director's work based on plot and cast information. For science, the system identified different research topics based on the papers cited within a researcher's publications."

"The role of AI writing systems as drafting buddies is a big departure from how writers typically get help, yet so far it is their biggest selling point and use case. Most writing tools available today will do some drafting for you, either by continuing where you left off or responding to a more specific instruction. SudoWrite, a popular AI writing tool for novelists, does all of these, with options to "write" where you left off, "describe" a highlighted noun, or "brainstorm" ideas based on a situation you describe. Systems like Jasper.ai or Lex will complete your paragraph or draft copy based on instructions, and Laika is similar but more focused on fiction and drama. "

"According to these internal documents, SIAM is a computer system that works behind the scenes of Iranian cellular networks, providing its operators a broad menu of remote commands to alter, disrupt, and monitor how customers use their phones. The tools can slow their data connections to a crawl, break the encryption of phone calls, track the movements of individuals or large groups, and produce detailed metadata summaries of who spoke to whom, when, and where. Such a system could help the government invisibly quash the ongoing protests - or those of tomorrow - an expert who reviewed the SIAM documents told The Intercept."

"Sam Smith, of the health data privacy group MedConfidential, said: "This is an utterly appalling case. It's an individual problem that the doctor did this. But it's a systemic problem that they could do it, and that flaws in the way the NHS's data management systems work meant that any doctor can do something like this to any patient."

"Rite Aid facial recognition misidentified Black, Latino and Asian people as 'likely' shoplifters Surveillance systems incorrectly and without customer consent marked shoppers as 'persons of interest', an FTC settlement says Johana Bhuiyan and agencies Wed 20 Dec 2023 14.29 EST Last modified on Thu 21 Dec 2023 12.04 EST Rite Aid used facial recognition systems to identify shoppers that were previously deemed "likely to engage" in shoplifting without customer consent and misidentified people - particularly women and Black, Latino or Asian people - on "numerous" occasions, according to a new settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. As part of the settlement, Rite Aid has been forbidden from deploying facial recognition technology in its stores for five years."

"The university presidents' council said this morning that the security of its central admissions system has been upgraded after the personal data of around 23,000 students was advertised for sale on the dark web. The university presidents' council insisted that the leaked admissions data, which included personal information and examination results, was only current through last May after anger erupted over the data breach. #BanTCAS was surging on Thai Twitter this morning in reference to the Thai University Central Admission System, or TCAS."

"The technology certainly has its flaws. While the system is theoretically designed not to cross some moral red lines - it's adamant that Hitler was bad - it's not difficult to trick the AI into sharing advice on how to engage in all sorts of evil and nefarious activities, particularly if you tell the chatbot that it's writing fiction. The system, like other AI models, can also say biased and offensive things. As my colleague Sigal Samuel has explained, an earlier version of GPT generated extremely Islamophobic content, and also produced some pretty concerning talking points about the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in China."

"The device tracks a single person with an accuracy of plus or minus 10 centimeters - about the size of an adult hand. Apart from the ability to "see" through a wall, its main advantage is that the person being tracked isn't required to wear a transmitter. While other location systems depend on Wi-Fi, this device can track a person's movements within the radius of its radio waves."

""We don't do facial recognition, we do face detection," Ke Quang, chief operating officer of Quividi, told the Guardian on Monday. "It's software which works from the video feed coming off the camera. It can detect if it's seeing a face, but it never records the image or biomorphological information or traits."