Digit_al Society

"Facebook failed to label 80% of articles on its platform promoting a fast-spreading conspiracy theory that the US is funding the use of bioweapons in Ukraine, according to a study released Friday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH)."

""The face jumped out at me as being fake," said DiResta, a veteran researcher who has studied Russian disinformation campaigns and anti-vaccine conspiracies. To her trained eye, these anomalies were red flags that Ramsey's photo had likely been created by artificial intelligence."

"In 2019, Genevieve (co-author of this article) and her husband applied for the same credit card. Despite having a slightly better credit score and the same income, expenses, and debt as her husband, the credit card company set her credit limit at almost half the amount. "

"Ege Gürdeniz: There are two components to Artificial Intelligence (AI) bias. The first is an AI application making biased decisions regarding certain groups of people. This could be ethnicity, religion, gender, and so on. To understand that we first need to understand how AI works and how it's trained to complete specific tasks."

"The premise of the commercial is that Progressive can't prevent us from becoming our parents but can save us money on insurance. In the commercial there was a scene where we're told, "we don't need to print the Internet." The commercial made me chuckle and it inspired this blog post. "

"Commentary: Our emails are getting more impolite and that might be a problem Although some choose to dive into their content immediately, starting your emails with an opening greeting could raise the chances of them being read, says the Financial Times' Pilita Clark."

"NBC has come under fire over the weekend for allegedly altering a photo taken of controversial University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological male who identifies as a woman, at the conclusion of a race. The photo appeared on a TODAY Show segment last week talking about Thomas ahead of the NCAA championships, which took place over the weekend."

"Researchers put AI normally used to search for helpful drugs into a kind of "bad actor" mode to show how easily it could be abused at a biological arms control conference. All the researchers had to do was tweak their methodology to seek out, rather than weed out toxicity. The AI came up with tens of thousands of new substances, some of which are similar to VX, the most potent nerve agent ever developed. Shaken, they published their findings this month in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence."

"Hayleigh Bosher, associate dean of intellectual property law at Brunel University, who researches the music industry, said "the law needs to move with the times" as "making music is so different to how it was 50 years ago". She added: If Sheeran loses, I imagine we will see even more cases. I don't think copyright is doing its job properly if songwriters are afraid, that's stifling creativity.""

"The gate, a chip component that switches transistors on and off, is a critical measure of transistor size. Previous research had already pushed gate lengths to one nanometer and below. By scaling gate lengths down to the size of single atoms, the latest work sets a new mark that'll be hard to beat. "In the future, it will be almost impossible for people to make a gate length smaller than 0.34 nm," the paper's senior author Tian-Ling Ren told IEEE Spectrum. "This could be the last node for Moore's Law.""

"Tech companies around the world appeared to listen. The very public and very swift removal of Russian channels on social media represented a sea change from years of prior content moderation decisions, when government requests for removals were often done with less fanfare and were frequently met with ire from human rights groups."

"These are yet more children getting conscripted, tik tok and all, into Putin's worst war yet. It's his western fellow travelers and apologists to get coarse at, the smilers with the knives under their cloaks."

"But it feels less creepy once you learn that these technologies don't have to rely on a camera to see where you are and what you're doing. Instead, they use radar. Google's Advanced Technology and Products division-better known as ATAP, the department behind oddball projects such as a touch-sensitive denim jacket-has spent the past year exploring how computers can use radar to understand our needs or intentions and then react to us appropriately."

"On Tuesday, security firm Cleafy reported that TeaBot was back. This time, the trojan spread through a malicious app called QR Code & Barcode Scanner, which as the name suggests, allowed users to interact with QR codes and barcodes. The app had more than 10,000 installations before Cleafy researchers notified Google of the fraudulent activity and Google removed it."

"The reasons for this "bot holiday", as Fisman calls it, are probably varied - but many of them point to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia's information war with western nations seems to be pivoting to new fronts, from vaccines to geopolitics."

"Cyber conflicts are fought in the shadows, but in the case of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it is a group that calls itself Anonymous that has made the most public declaration of war. Late on Thursday the hacker collective tweeted from an account linked to Anonymous, @YourAnonOne, that it had Vladimir Putin's regime in its sights."

""It's not so much the technical disruption, it's what it does to undermine confidence, like in the financial sector. It gets people quite nervous. It's more that kind of secondary impact," said Jamie Collier, a Mandiant consultant, who described a DDoS as akin to stuffing a thousand envelopes through a letterbox every second."

"My prediction failed. For a decade and a half, Facebook resisted the fate of all the social networks that preceded it. In hindsight, it's easy to see why: it cheated. The company used investor cash to buy and neutralize competitors ("Kids are leaving Facebook for Insta? Fine, we'll buy Insta. We know you value choice!"). It allegedly spied on users through the deceptive use of apps such as Onavo and exploited the intelligence to defeat rivals. More than anything, it ratcheted up "switching costs.""

"But in internet time 2009 was aeons ago. Now, intensive surveillance is available to anyone. And you don't have to be a tech wizard to do it. In mid-January this year, Kashmir Hill, a talented American tech reporter, used three bits of everyday consumer electronics - Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker - to track her husband's every move. He agreed to this in principle, but didn't realise just how many devices she had planted on him. He found only two of the trackers: a Tile he felt in the breast pocket of his coat and an AirTag in his backpack when he was looking for something else. "It is impossible to find a device that makes no noise and gives no warning," he said when she showed him the ones he missed."