Digit_al Society

"As it turns out, the best way to beat YouTube horrid algorithm (and protect yourself from accidentally getting radicalized by some Antisemitic Flat-Earth Groomer bullshit) is to simply not interact with the platform, except to watch the video you went there to watch."

"The chief working officer of Techbuyer, an IT asset disposal firm in Harrogate, was standing in a big windowless room of an information centre in London surrounded by hundreds of used exhausting drives owned by a bank card firm. Knowing he might wipe the drives and promote them on, he provided a six-figure sum for all of the units. The reply was no. Instead, a lorry could be pushed as much as the positioning and the data-storing units could be dropped inside by authorised safety personnel. Then industrial machines would shred them into tiny fragments. "

"Since its inception, facial recognition technology has been met with equal doses of skepticism and controversy. One company scraped billions of photos from social media without the public's knowledge, building a near-universal facial recognition application and inciting cries of infringement on constitutional freedom and exacerbation of racial biases."

"The BBC spoke to several students and parents who vouched for the quality of Byju's learning content - in a country where rote learning is often the norm, Byju's has been credited for deftly using technology to create immersive, engaging lessons. It also claims to have the industry's highest net promoter score (NPS), which measures customer experience and predicts business growth. "

"Ransomware hunters: the self-taught tech geniuses fighting cybercrime"

"Sadiq Khan has received a wave of social media abuse, some of it racist, after newspapers incorrectly that reported he might block a new statue of the Queen, days after the London mayor warned that some media outlets were "monetising" hatred."

""With streaming, things were starting to become quite throwaway and disposable," says Finlay Shakespeare. A Bristol-based musician and audio engineer, Shakespeare recently deleted his streaming accounts and bought a used iPod on eBay for £40. With streaming, he says: "If I didn't gel with an album or an artist's work at first, I tended not to go back to it." But he realised that a lot of his all-time favourite albums were ones that grew on him over time. "Streaming was actually contributing to some degree of dismissal of new music." Even with digital downloads, he tended to give music more time and attention."

"A controversial reform of the federal nature conservation act, pushed through by Olaf Scholz's coalition government earlier this summer, slashes red tape around building windfarms near nesting sites, but banks on AI-driven "anti-collision systems" as one way to minimise such accidents."

"In cases where Chrome Enhanced Spellcheck or Edge's Microsoft Editor (spellchecker) were enabled, "basically anything" entered in form fields of these browsers was transmitted to Google and Microsoft. "Furthermore, if you click on 'show password,' the enhanced spellcheck even sends your password, essentially Spell-Jacking your data," explains otto-js in a blog post."

"Spyware apps were foisted on students at the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns. Today, long after most students have returned to in-person learning, those apps are still proliferating, and enabling an ever-expanding range of human rights abuses. In a recent Center for Democracy and Technology report, 81 percent of teachers said their schools use some form of this "student monitoring" spyware. Yet many of the spyware companies supplying these apps seem neither prepared nor concerned about the harms they are inflicting on students. "

"Fluent in Digital Culture - Not Academic Tools"

"Brain scans predict students' learning better than exam results and show the underlying structure of thinking. According to recent research published in Science Advances, the conventional exams and grades that schools have long employed may evaluate learning less accurately than brain scans."

"Japan isn't the only nation that has struggled to phase out the outdated technology - the U.S. Defense Department only announced in 2019 that it has ended the use of floppy disks, which were first developed in the 1960s, in a control system for its nuclear arsenal. Sony Group Corp. stopped making the disks in 2011 and many young people would struggle to describe how to use one or even identify one in the modern workplace."

"What distinguishes Fog Reveal from other cellphone location technologies used by police is that it follows the devices through their advertising IDs, unique numbers assigned to each device. These numbers do not contain the name of the phone's user, but can be traced to homes and workplaces to help police establish pattern-of-life analyses."

"Internet shutdowns are not just used by governments facing civil unrest. Every year millions of internet users from Sudan to Syria, Jordan to India also lose internet access during exam season as governments pull the plug in a bid to avoid hi-tech cheating."

"But it also raises uncomfortable questions: is AI technology helping marginalized people overcome bias, or just perpetuating the biases that make their lives hard in the first place?"

"How Ukraine turns cheap tablets into lethal weapons Army SOS, an activist-led NGO, converts Android-based tablets into smart units with automated precision guidance."