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"When individuals migrate, their data migrates with them. When people leave their countries to travel and live in different places whether as migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers, they are not only seeking physical safety, they also need to be sure that their digital identity and information will be safe. However, if they are not careful or protected, their data could unwittingly leave a trail of their movements, potentially exposing them to various threats. Whether they are fleeing war, authoritarian regimes, or other adversaries, this data could inadvertently connect their identities to their pursuers."

""This photo is a prime example of why 2024 is a crucial year for spotting - and stopping - manipulated media," says Shweta Singh, an assistant professor of information systems at Warwick Business School. "Whilst this may have been some low-level photoshopping, much of the edited media currently circulating can be more sinister. With elections in both the UK and the US this year, the importance of media being genuine has never been higher. Suspect photoshopping like this only undermines the faith of the public in the media they are presented with, and risks seriously damaging public trust.""

"A pilot study by academics at the University of Oxford found some care providers had been using generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard to create care plans for people receiving care. That presents a potential risk to patient confidentiality, according to Dr Caroline Green, an early career research fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford, who surveyed care organisations for the study. "If you put any type of personal data into [a generative AI chatbot], that data is used to train the language model," Green said. "That personal data could be generated and revealed to somebody else." She said carers might act on faulty or biased information and inadvertently cause harm, and an AI-generated care plan might be substandard."

"A big leak of data from a Chinese cybersecurity firm has revealed state security agents paying tens of thousands of pounds to harvest data on targets, including foreign governments, while hackers hoover up huge amounts of information on any person or institution who might be of interest to their prospective clients. The cache of more than 500 leaked files from the Chinese firm I-Soon was posted on the developer website Github and is thought by cybersecurity experts to be genuine. Some of the targets discussed include Nato and the UK Foreign Office."

"The problem extends beyond the Pegasus project. Installed in Mexico City is one of the largest urban surveillance systems in the Americas: El Centro de Comando, Control, Cómputo, Comunicaciones y Contacto Ciudadano, better known as El C5. The network, connected to panic buttons and command centers, is spread over 1,485 kilometers with software designed to automatically detect license plates. On top of that, the number of installed cameras grew from 18 million to 65 million between 2018 and 2022, with stated plans to add at least an additional 16 million more. Despite its apparent pre-eminence, issues have arisen with the C5, from false identifications to mishandling of personal data. Technological malfunctions have also been shown to impact the outcomes of criminal cases because of the assumption of objectivity that video surveillance supposedly construes. The sprawling C5 system is dwarfed only by the Titan, an expansive intelligence and security database, both in terms of scale and threat to civil liberties. The software is used by several Mexican state governments to combine location data with other private information, including financial, government, and telecom data, to geolocate individuals across the country in real time. Governmental officials have been criticized for the controversial use of the database to target public figures, but, more problematically, access to Titan-enabled intel can be gained through an underground market, making it a further liability. The extent to which artificial intelligence has been incorporated into the C5 and Titan is still not clear, but the specter of surveillance remains large and is set to cause more worries with the addition of new smart technologies."

"Musician Ashley Beauchamp, 30, was trying to track down a missing parcel but was having no joy in getting useful information from the chatbot. Fed up, he decided to have some fun instead and began to experiment to find out what the chatbot could do. Beauchamp said this was when the "chaos started". To begin with, he asked it to tell him a joke, but he soon progressed to getting the chatbot to write a poem criticising the company. With a few more prompts the chatbot also swore."

"A wave of artificial intelligence-driven misinformation and disinformation that could influence key looming elections poses the biggest short-term threat to the global economy, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has said. In a deeply gloomy assessment, the body that convenes its annual meeting in Davos next week expressed concern that politics could be disrupted by the spread of false information, potentially leading to riots, strikes and crackdowns on dissent from governments."

"The use of "geofence warrants" have exploded in recent years, in large part thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones coupled with hungry data companies like Google vacuuming up and storing huge amounts of its users' location data, which becomes obtainable by law enforcement requests. Police can use geofence warrants (also known as reverse-location warrants) to demand that Google turn over information on which users' devices were in a particular geographic area at a certain point in time."

"After "social engineering" efforts using personal details to target staff were uncovered, badges no longer carry last names, clean-desk policies are far more strictly enforced and the processing and communication of sensitive information is now subject to higher bars of regular mandatory training."

"Nepal has said it will ban TikTok, citing negative effects on the country's "social harmony". The popular video-sharing platform, which has around a billion monthly users, has faced restrictions in many countries for alleged breaches of data rules and for the potentially harmful impact on youth of some content. "The decision to ban was made today, and relevant authorities are currently addressing the technical issues," the minister for communications and information technology, Rekha Sharma, said on Monday."

"Artificial Intelligence has the ability to perform illegal financial trades and cover it up, new research suggests. In a demonstration at the UK's AI safety summit, a bot used made-up insider information to make an "illegal" purchase of stocks without telling the firm. When asked if it had used insider trading, it denied the fact. Insider trading refers to when confidential company information is used to make trading decisions. Firms and individuals are only allowed to use publicly-available information when buying or selling stocks. "

"Wikipedia lives and dies by its references, the links to sources that back up information in the online encyclopaedia. But sometimes, those references are flawed - pointing to broken websites, erroneous information or non-reputable sources. A study published on 19 October in Nature Machine Intelligence1 suggests that artificial intelligence (AI) can help to clean up inaccurate or incomplete reference lists in Wikipedia entries, improving their quality and reliability."

"What's fascinating about all this is how much of it comes down, not to finance or technology, but to people and what they know. In that sense the FT's deep dive into TSMC's travails reminded me of a striking piece of research conducted decades ago by the philosopher of science Harry Collins when he was a PhD student. Collins was interested in how knowledge gets transferred and intrigued by a particular piece of technology, the TEA laser. This was a device that was comprehensively documented in the physics literature but which research laboratories were unable to replicate. What Collins discovered was that "nobody could make the laser work if they hadn't spent time in a laboratory that already had a working laser. There was very good information in the journals about how to build such a laser. But anybody who tried to put one together using written articles failed. They had something that looked like a laser on their bench, but it wouldn't lase.""

"Green Light uses machine learning systems to comb through Maps data to calculate the amount of traffic congestion present at a given light, as well as the average wait times of vehicles stopped there. That information is then used to train AI models that can autonomously optimize the traffic timing at that intersection, reducing idle times as well as the amount of braking and accelerating vehicles have to do there. It's all part of Google's goal to help its partners collectively reduce their carbon emissions by a gigaton by 2030."

"No prominent developer of AI foundation models - a list including companies like OpenAI and Meta - is releasing sufficient information about their potential impact on society, determines a new report from Stanford HAI (Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence). Today, Stanford HAI released its Foundation Model Transparency Index, which tracked whether creators of the 10 most popular AI models disclose information about their work and how people use their systems. Among the models it tested, Meta's Llama 2 scored the highest, followed by BloomZ and then OpenAI's GPT-4. But none of them, it turned out, got particularly high marks."

"But an analysis by the Office of Information Technology Services issued last month "acknowledges that the risks of the use of (facial recognition technology) in an educational setting may outweigh the benefits." The report, sought by the Legislature, noted "the potentially higher rate of false positives for people of color, non-binary and transgender people, women, the elderly, and children." It also cited research from the nonprofit Violence Project that found that 70% of school shooters from 1980 to 2019 were current students. The technology, the report said, "may only offer the appearance of safer schools.""

"Analyst Brian Nowak estimates that the AI technology will have a $4.1 trillion economic effect on the labor force - or affect about 44% of labor - over the next few years by changing input costs, automating tasks and shifting the ways companies obtain, process and analyze information. Today, Morgan Stanley pegs the AI effect at $2.1 trillion, affecting 25% of labor. "We see generative AI expanding the scope of business processes that can be automated," he wrote in a Sunday note. "At the same time, the input costs supporting GenAI functionality are rapidly falling, enabling a strongly expansionary impact to software production. As a result, Generative AI is set to impact the labor markets, expand the enterprise software TAM, and drive incremental spend for Public Cloud services.""

"The platforms that control search were conceived in sin. Their business model auctions off our most precious and limited cognitive resource: attention. These platforms work overtime to hijack our attention by purveying information that arouses curiosity, outrage, or anger. The more our eyeballs remain glued to the screen, the more ads they can show us, and the greater profits accrue to their shareholders."

"So if we put those three findings together, what do we get? * Small groups of * ageing * right-wingers * on their desktop computers (because this study wasn't-couldn't be-carried out on mobile, only desktop) ..get their information from unreliable, partisan news sites. The study doesn't say whether they then go on to share it on Facebook or on their Twitter account grumpyboomer032945231, but it's not hard to imagine that's what happens. This isn't to let the search algorithms off the hook either, but does go to show that the real problem, as ever, lies with the humans."

"Late last year, IBM took the record for the largest quantum computing system with a processor that contained 433 quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum information processing. Now, the company has set its sights on a much bigger target: a 100,000-qubit machine that it aims to build within 10 years."