Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

"Rekognition indicated high confidence that 28 members of the current Congress were known arrestees. It was wrong in every case. The false positives disproportionately targeted racialized members of Congress. This, finally, has Congress's attention: members of Congress have sent some pointed questions to Amazon about its Rekognition tool and given them a deadline of Aug 20 to respond. They've also requested an immediate meeting with Jeff Bezos to discuss the topic in depth."

"Across the technology industry, rank-and-file employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they build. At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech startups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere."

"For example, I've been repeatedly emailed by company spokespeople to tell me that cops only get access to Ring customers' videos if the customers offer to share it; but what they never said is that if a customer turns down a police request, Amazon instructs the cops to make an "official request" to the company and then they grant warrantless access to the footage. "

"It is time now for two things: for people to wake up and realise how much our lives are dominated by such a small number of Silicon Valley bros, one hand in their jean pocket announcing their next move, and for tech companies to acknowledge their power and influence and become truly accountable."

"Dozens of people who say they were subjected to death threats, racial slurs, and blackmail after their in-home Ring smart cameras were hacked are suing the company over "horrific" invasions of privacy."

"India's government has ordered that all online news, social media and video streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime are to be subject to state regulation, raising fears of increased censorship of digital media. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which regulates and censors print newspapers, television, films and theatre, will also have jurisdiction, under the new order, over digital news and entertainment platforms in India."

""I thought: 'This is strange - who's writing a biography of me?'" Cellan-Jones told the Observer. "I don't kid myself. It's difficult enough for me to sell books about myself, [let alone] for other people to sell books about me." But glancing at a few passages revealed that Cellan-Jones had fallen victim to someone attempting to piggyback on his memoir by releasing a title with text apparently generated by artificial intelligence - one of an influx of AI titles since the emergence of ChatGPT enabled people to generate pages of text rather than bothering to write it."

"Amazon is to pay $25m (£20m) to settle allegations that it violated children's privacy rights with its Alexa voice assistant. The company agreed to pay the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after it was accused of failing to delete Alexa recordings at the request of parents. It was found to have kept hold of sensitive data for years. Amazon's doorbell camera unit Ring will also pay out after giving employees unrestricted access to customers' data."

"At Amazon, some warehouse and delivery drivers complain that AI-driven bots have fired them without any human intervention whatsoever. At some companies, surveillance apps track how much time workers spend in trips to the bathroom, with some workers protesting that the time limits are too strict."

"The Apple TV is not a full-blown television. Instead, it's a set-top box that connects to a TV and delivers content like movies and television shows from sources like iTunes and Netflix, similar to a Roku or Amazon Fire TV." The Apple TV will come out and it will be interesting to see how the public reacts to it.

Talking of EULA's in the examination....

"More than 150 artificial intelligence researchers have signed an open letter calling for future research in the field to focus on maximising the social benefit of AI, rather than simply making it more capable. The signatories, which include researchers from Oxford, Cambridge, MIT and Harvard as well as staff at Google, Amazon and IBM, celebrate progress in the field, but warn that "potential pitfalls" must be avoided."

"Going from small data analytics to Big Data analytics or to predictive and prescriptive analytics is trickier. Expanding in both dimensions is human capital intensive, requiring talented data scientists. A McKinsey report (2011) estimates that by 2018, there will be a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 workers with "deep analytical" experience and a further 1.5 million data-literate managers in the US. Technology giants such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, and large investment banks and top hedge funds can afford such employees, however even now the competition is fierce, as is evidenced by the ongoing talent war in Silicon Valley. The data scientist is indeed a sexy job in the 21st century."

"This month, in an open-access study published in PLOS One, a team reported the first brain implant system that lets patients use their thoughts to navigate an off-the-shelf Android tablet. Compared to previous generations, this system doesn't require training-for example, learning to type on a different, non-QWERTY keyboard-or specialized interface equipment. With just her thoughts, T6 was able to send emails, chat with other paralyzed patients in the trial, Google random questions, and even shop on Amazon. For the first time since she became paralyzed, T6 regained access to the entire commercially-available Google Play ecosystem and the digital world."

"The mapping information could ostensibly tell third-parties when the owners are most often home, the shape of rooms, the size of houses, and even the frequency of cleanings. Gizmodo imagines that a room's shape could be valuable to Amazon as information on the acoustics of a room containing an Alexa device, informing both volume and directional settings so that its broadcasting and microphone can work properly. "