"Some unemployment applicants have said that ID.me's facial recognition models fail to properly identify them (generally speaking, facial recognition technology is notoriously less accurate for women and people of color). And after their applications were put on hold because their identity couldn't be verified, many should-be beneficiaries have had to wait days or weeks to reach an ID.me "trusted referee" who could confirm what the technology couldn't."
"Egyptian police on Tuesday arrested a Tiktok star who has been sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for her posts on social media.
Haneen Hossam, a 20-year-old Cairo University student who became an influencer on video sharing app Tiktok, was sentenced in absentia on Sunday alongside four others."
"But could robots ever reproduce? This, undoubtedly, forms a pillar of "life" as shared by all natural organisms. A team of researchers from the UK and the Netherlands have recently demonstrated a fully automated technology to allow physical robots to repeatedly breed, evolving their artificial genetic code over time to better adapt to their environment. Arguably, this amounts to artificial evolution. Child robots are created by mixing the digital "DNA" from two parent robots on a computer."
"This is an abuse of the concept of consent and risks desensitizing people to surveillance. Eproctoring also treats students as if they are guilty until proven innocent, which is a concerning and disrespectful stance for any academic institution to take."
What do you think?
"Rather to Facebook's surprise, Free Basics was not universally welcomed in some of its target territories. The most vocal opposition came in India, the most important market outside of the west, where ungrateful critics perceived it an example of "digital colonialism" and it was eventually blocked by the country's telecoms regulator on the grounds that it violated the principle of net neutrality by explicitly favouring some kinds of online content while effectively blocking others. Beyond India, however, Free Basics seems to be thriving, being used by "up to 100 million" people in 65 countries, including 28 in Africa."
"JBS, the world's biggest meat processor, has paid an $11m (£7.8m) ransom after a cyber-attack shut down operations, including abattoirs in the US, Australia and Canada.
While most of its operations have been restored, the Brazilian-headquartered company said it hoped the payment would head off any further complications including data theft."
"But unbeknown to Real G and hundreds of criminals who until this week believed that ANOM was the best way to arrange drug deals, money laundering and murders away from the eyes of authorities, the FBI was also secretly copied in on every message.
Indeed, in one of the most elaborate and sprawling honeypot traps known to date, the entire communications platform was being covertly operated by the FBI, marking a first for the agency."
"El Salvador has become the first country in the world to adopt bitcoin as legal tender after its congress approved President Nayib Bukele's proposal to embrace the cryptocurrency in an effort to promote "financial inclusion", investment and economic development."
"An internet blackout that knocked out some of the world's biggest websites on Tuesday was ultimately caused by a single customer updating their settings, the infrastructure provider Fastly has revealed.
A bug in Fastly's code introduced in mid-May had lain dormant until Tuesday morning, according to Nick Rockwell, the company's head of engineering and infrastructure. When the unnamed customer updated their settings, it triggered the flaw, which ultimately took down 85% of the company's network."
"Combined with Apple's previous steps, the private relay feature "will effectively render IP addresses useless as a fingerprinting mechanism," Charles Farina, head of innovation at digital marketing firm Adswerve, told Reuters.
It would also prevent advertisers from using IP addresses to pinpoint a person's location, he said."
"Beginning in 2017, I did a project with artist Trevor Paglen to look at how people were being labelled. We found horrifying classificatory terms that were misogynist, racist, ableist, and judgmental in the extreme. Pictures of people were being matched to words like kleptomaniac, alcoholic, bad person, closet queen, call girl, slut, drug addict and far more I cannot say here. ImageNet has now removed many of the obviously problematic people categories - certainly an improvement - however, the problem persists because these training sets still circulate on torrent sites [where files are shared between peers]."
"Microsoft has blamed human error after its search engine, Bing, blocked image and video results for the phrase "tank man" - a reference to the iconic image of a lone protester facing down tanks during the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square - on the 32nd anniversary of the military crackdown.
Users reported that no results were shown for the search query in countries including the US, Germany, Singapore, France and Switzerland, according to Reuters and Vice News."
""I think, without question, having access to quantitative data about our conversations, about facial expressions and intonations, would provide another dimension to the clinical interaction that's not detected right now," said Barron, a psychiatrist based in Seattle and author of the new book Reading Our Minds: The Rise of Big Data Psychiatry."
"Humming does not sit easily with the way we imagine technology, but it highlights a crucial truth about how humans navigate the world of work, in offices, online or anywhere else: even if we think we are rational, logical creatures, we make decisions in social groups by absorbing a wide range of signals. And perhaps the best way to understand this is to employ an idea popularised by anthropologists working at companies such as Xerox during the late 20th century, and since used by Beunza and others on Wall Street: "Sense-making"."
"Amazon customers have one week to opt out of a plan that would turn every Echo speaker and Ring security camera in the US into a shared wireless network, as part of the company's plan to fix connection problems for its smart home devices."
"When researchers looked at data measuring respondents' online behaviour, those with inflated perceptions of their abilities more frequently visited websites linked to the spread of false or misleading news. The overconfident participants were also less able to distinguish between true and false claims about current events and reported higher willingness to share false content, especially when it aligned with their political predispositions, the authors found."
"THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
The fear of losing control aside, many hawkers also have to deal with another major challenge: Digital technology, which entails some basic competence in logic and literacy - much to the horror of those who only received some primary school education, typical of the older generation of hawkers."
"But historically, these tools have been put into use only after a rigorous peer review of the raw data and statistical analyses used to develop them. Epic's Deterioration Index, on the other hand, remains proprietary despite its widespread deployment. Although physicians are provided with a list of the variables used to calculate the index and a rough estimate of each variable's impact on the score, we aren't allowed under the hood to evaluate the raw data and calculations. "
"Interoperability is the technical term for what we've lost as tech has matured. Software can be interoperable, either through common, open file formats, or through different programs speaking directly to one another, and so too can hardware: open standards are what allow you to use any headphones with any music player, for instance, or buy a TV without worrying if it will work with your streaming set-up."
"Facebook has lifted a ban on posts claiming Covid-19 was man-made, following a resurgence of interest in the "lab leak" theory of the disease's onset.
The social network says its new policy comes "in light of ongoing investigations into the origin"."
