Digit_al Society

"Just ahead of the first anniversary of its release, Indian law enforcers are accusing the popular game of inciting violence and distracting kids from their studies, even pushing for a large-scale prohibition of the "battle-royal" style shooter. Following numerous complaints by parents, a temporary ban on the mobile app was first announced by police in metropolitan Rajkot, with some other cities multiplayer-game soon following suit. While the current ban only extends until March 30, the police and children's rights watchdog are petitioning New Delhi to ban the game altogether"

" filters are so expensive that only US Big Tech companies could afford them, and they are incapable of distinguishing fair dealing (including things like the music playing in the background of the video of your child's first steps) from infringement, and they are incredibly error prone, to say nothing of the problems of allowing anyone in the world to identify creative works as their copyright with no means to weed out false and fraudulent claims."

" discovered an insecure Chinese database of 1.8 million women, aged 15-39"

"Universal has deployed the creepily named Validfill RFID system"

"There are some things that you can do to protect yourself from falling for a hoax. As the author of the upcoming book "Fake Photos," to be published in August, I'd like to offer a few tips to protect yourself from falling for a hoax."

"Automatically produced texts use language models derived from statistical analysis of vast corpuses of human-generated text to produce machine-generated texts that can be very hard for a human to distinguish from text produced by another human. These models could help malicious actors in many ways, including generating convincing spam, reviews, and comments -- so it's really important to develop tools that can help us distinguish between human-generated and machine-generated texts."

"The underlying theory is that art evolves "through small alterations to a known style that produce a new one," which, as Ian Bogost (previously) points out, is "a convenient take, given that any machine-learning technique has to base its work on a specific training set.""

"The single biggest known British political advertiser on Facebook is a mysterious pro-Brexit campaign group pushing for a no-deal exit from the EU. The revelation about Britain's Future, which has never disclosed the source of its funding or organisational structure, has raised concerns about the influence of "dark money" in British politics."

""My PhD students seem to have to spend three years just getting to the point where they understand what's being asked of them," he says. Once again, he looks pained. "We seem to be hitting problems that will require so many strands that one mind isn't going to be able to pull them together.""

"But researchers have approximately zero clues as to why it's so good at it, and it doesn't help that the AI essentially taught itself to make these predictions. According to one researcher involved in the project, "We can build these models, but we don't know how they work.""

""The idea that we can have counter-speech when [Facebook] groups become brigade mobs is ludicrous," said Renee DiResta, an expert in online misinformation and co-founder of Vaccinate California. "It makes just participating as an everyday citizen a high-stakes ordeal.""

""Urban legends are projections of society's anxieties, hopes, fears, and worries," says Blank. "In today's society we have societal anxiety about what our kids are doing on the internet, the amount of control and information that's available to kids nowadays, societal fears about cyberbullying and how people are managing their mental health online, especially for kids." "The Momo story reflects that anxiety of what is it our kids are doing online," continued Blank."

""If they are not happy, and not eating well, in some cases you can predict whether the pig is sick," said Jackson He, chief executive officer of Yingzi Technology, a small firm based in the southern city of Guangzhou that has introduced its vision of a "future pig farm" with facial and voice recognition technologies. China's biggest tech firms want to pamper pigs, too. Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, and JD.com, its rival, are using cameras to track pigs' faces. Alibaba also uses voice-recognition software to monitor their coughs."

"no dearth of posts related to vaccines, the top 50 Facebook pages ranked by the number of public posts they made about vaccines generated nearly half (46 percent) of the top 10,000 posts for or against vaccinations, as well as 38 percent of the total likes on those posts, from January 2016 to February of this year."

"Of all the disturbing parts of this @CaseyNewton piece about Facebook content reviewers -- and there are many -- the one about people slowly coming to believe the conspiracy theories sticks with me https://t.co/ulDx3PEaWa"

"Westfield's Smartscreen network was developed by the French software firm Quividi back in 2015. Their discreet cameras capture blurry images of shoppers and apply statistical analysis to identify audience demographics. And once the billboards have your attention they hit record, sharing your reaction with advertisers. Quividi says their billboards can distinguish shoppers' gender with 90% precision, five categories of mood from "very happy to very unhappy" and customers' age within a five-year bracket."

"The system used historical data, including arrest records and electronic police reports, to forecast crime and help shape public safety strategies, according to company and city government materials. At no point did those materials suggest any effort to clean or amend the data to address the violations revealed by the DOJ. In all likelihood, the corrupted data was fed directly into the system, reinforcing the department's discriminatory practices."

"self-awareness: Columbia engineers created a robot that could figure out what it looked like without any external input. In essence, it could imagine itself"

"learning to play a musical instrument, you have to play the same songs and scales over and over again. YouTube's algorithm doesn't seem to know this, and so it demonetized a piano tutorial channel for "Repetitious content.""