Digit_al Society

"But there is another set of Facebook stories that shines even more glaring light on the company's mismatch of power and responsibility. A good place to start is Sri Lanka: one of many countries where "fake news" is not the slightly jokey notion regularly played up by Trump, but sometimes a matter of life and death."

"However, according to data on the force's website, 92% (2,297) of those were found to be "false positives". South Wales police admitted that "no facial recognition system is 100% accurate", but said the technology had led to more than 450 arrests since its introduction. It also said no one had been arrested after an incorrect match."

"Already, artificially intelligent software can evolve false political and social constructs highly targeted to sway specific audiences. Users find themselves in highly individualized, algorithmically determined news and information feeds, intentionally designed to: isolate them from conflicting evidence or opinions, create self-reinforcing feedback loops of confirmation, and untether them from fact-based reality. And these are just early days. If memes and disinformation have been weaponized on social media, it is still in the musket stage."

"In 1998, the US Congress retroactively extended the copyright on US works, placing public domain works back into copyright and forestalling the entry into the public domain of a great mass of works that were soon to become public domain; now, 20 years later with no copyright term extension in sight, the US public domain is about to receive the first of many annual infusions to come, a great mass of works that will be free for all to use. "

"Thanks to a map that shows the jogging habits of the 27 million people who use Fitbits and the like, we can see splotches of activity in otherwise dark areas, like Iraq and Syria. Some of those splotches are known American military sites full of exercising soldiers, and some, by extrapolation, are sites that the military would rather keep unknown. One journalist saw a lot of exercise activity on a Somalian beach that was suspected to be home to a CIA base. Someone else spotted a suspected missile site in Yemen, and a web of bases in Afghanistan were also revealed."

"So they trained a deep-learning neural net on tons of examples of deepfaked videos, and produced a model that's better than any previous automated technique at spotting hoaxery. (Their paper documenting the work is here.)"

"In the meantime, Pham is keen to see if robots can learn to build the chair using only an image of the assembled product as a guide. Will the technology ever help humans who struggle with the task? "I don't think it is in Ikea's business model to have robots assemble their chairs," he said. "In the next 10 to 20 years, people will still be sweating over flat-pack furniture.""

"The "battle for Telegram" pits one of Russia's most popular messaging apps - with more than 13 million users - against the internet censor Roskomnadzor, in a public cat-and-mouse game to block traffic that has put the agency's reputation on the line. Telegram is widely used by the Russian political establishment, and prominent politicians and officials have openly flouted or criticised the ban. Data from the app showed several Kremlin officials had continued to sign in on Tuesday evening, four days after a court ordered the service to be blocked over alleged terrorism concerns."

"Chinese police say they used facial recognition to identify, then arrest a man attending a crowded concert in Nanchang, China's third largest city. South China Morning Post reports that security cameras equipped with the software pinpointed the man out of the estimated 50,000 other people also in attendance at the concert. "

"SINGAPORE - In the not too distant future, surveillance cameras sitting atop over 100,000 lampposts in Singapore could help authorities pick out and recognise faces in crowds across the island-state. The plan to install the cameras, which will be linked to facial recognition software, is raising privacy fears among security experts and rights groups. The government said the system would allow it to "perform crowd analytics" and support anti-terror operations."

""Before anyone meets a new person these days they Google them," Tomlinson said. He added that many people engaged in misdeeds when they were young and if the misdeeds were constantly brought to the attention of others then they would permanently have a negative effect."

"Personalized pricing, which is also known as price discrimination or price optimization, depending on whether you're an economist or an online marketer, is a growing trend. According to a recent Deloitte and Salesforce report, 40% of brands that currently use AI to personalize the customer experience have used it to tailor pricing and promotions in real time. "

"Hackers have attacked networks in a number of countries including data centres in Iran, where they left the image of a US flag on screens along with a warning: "Don't mess with our elections", the Iranian IT ministry said on Saturday. "The attack apparently affected 200,000 router switches across the world in a widespread attack, including 3,500 switches in our country," the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology said in a statement carried by Iran's official news agency IRNA"

"Cambridge Analytica sought to influence the Nigerian presidential election in 2015 by using graphically violent imagery to portray a candidate as a supporter of sharia law who would brutally suppress dissenters and negotiate with militant Islamists, a video passed to British MPs reveals."

"The robust way to do that, the way that can't be set aside at the whim of a government, is to require systems to be built so as not to collect data about a person. The basic principle is that a system must be designed not to collect certain data, if its basic function can be carried out without that data."