Digit_al Society

"The NSA uses laughably sloppy tools for deciding whether a target is a "US person" (a person in the USA, or an American citizen abroad). For example, people whose address books contain foreign persons are presumed by some analysts to be foreign. Likewise, people who post in "foreign" languages (the US has no official state language) are presumed by some analysts to be non-US persons."

"America's National Security Agency gathers unfathomable mountains of Internet communications from fiber optic taps and other means, but it says it only retains and searches the communications of "targeted" individuals who've done something suspicious. Guess what? If you read Boing Boing, you've been targeted."

"The BBC complained that a 2007 article about the ousting of Merrill Lynch's CEO had been pulled from certain Google searches in Europe. The Guardian revealed that six articles had been pulled from search results, including three from as far back as 2010 about a Scottish referee who was forced to resign after lying about a penalty and one from 2011 about French workers making Post-it art."

"The response on Twitter was predictably splenetic. Suárez's supporters claimed the images were manipulated, their argument promoted by a rather well-done diptych which did the rounds. The left-hand image - which had been photoshopped to remove the marks - purported to be the "real" unaltered version, while the right hand side - Gentile's original image - was labelled the fake."

"Fear of data-mining of healthcare could be costing as many as 100,000 lives a year, according to Google's Larry Page. Speaking out in response to fears over his company's vast haul of personal information, Page made the case that not only is Google not going too far with collecting and analysing such information - it's not going far enough."

"The algorithm at play is performing what's commonly referred to as predictive policing. Using years - and sometimes decades - worth of crime reports, the algorithm analyses the data to identify areas with high probabilities for certain types of crime, placing little red boxes on maps of the city that are streamed into patrol cars."

"Taken as a whole, the information Google collects about users is shockingly complete. The company can mine your emails and Drive documents, track your browsing history, track the videos you watch on YouTube, obtain your WiFi passwords and much more."

"Advances in technology have long been recognised as a threat to manual labour. Now highly skilled, knowledge-based jobs that were once regarded as safe could be at risk. How will they adapt to the digital age?"

"Mounds of decaying air conditioners, piles of abandoned electronics and tenements built among the trash … Reuters photographer Kim Kyung-Hoon has documented the lives of residents of Dongxiaokou, a village outside Beijing and home to a large electronic-waste recycling centre, for a look at life amid the digital ruins"

"The Turing Test was passed for the first time by a chatbot called "Eugene Goostman" on Saturday by convincing 33% of the human judges that it was human, according to Professor Kevin Warwick, a Visiting Professor at the University of Reading and Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research at Coventry University, in a statement."

"But what will robot cars be programmed to do when there's lots of them on the roads, and they're networked with one another? We know what we as individuals would like. My car should take as its Prime Directive: "Prevent my passengers from coming to harm." But when the cars are networked, their Prime Directive well might be: "Minimize the amount of harm to humans overall." "

"(And, in fact, anonymity apps have brought positives along with the negatives. Not long ago, a post on Secret reported that Google had acquired the poster's five-person company and had hired everyone but her. Later posts revealed that she was the only female at the company and had been there since it was founded. The thread became the talk of Silicon Valley, generating a lively debate about suppressed sexism in the start-up community. The poster's ability to remain anonymous was key to this information coming out. She could stand up to power, speak without embarrassment, and avoid alienating potential employers who might take a dim view of her controversial statements. That's exactly why the First Amendment protects anonymous speech, and that's why the value of anonymity apps like Yik Yak shouldn't be summarily dismissed. "

"Turkey has finally restored access to YouTube, 67 days after the government blocked the video-sharing website. The Turkey's telecommunications authority (TIB) lifted the ban on Tuesday, removing YouTube from the "blocked sites" listed on its website. The move came four days after the country's Constitutional Court ruled that the ban violated Turks' free speech rights and ordered the ban be lifted."

"A newly released set of slides from the Snowden leaks reveals that the NSA is harvesting millions of facial images from the Web for use in facial recognition algorithms through a program called "Identity Intelligence." James Risen and Laura Poitras's NYT piece shows that the NSA is linking these facial images with other biometrics, identity data, and "behavioral" data including "travel, financial, behaviors, social network." "

""The technology is also useful in cases where the driver loses consciousness and has let go of the steering wheel. If such an event occurs, the car will independently pull over. Temporary control of the car is the second wave of driver perception-enhancement - while we are still on the first wave, which culminates with the car's ability to break on its own in case of emergency. Therefore, the next phase is automated driving, the instant you let go of the wheel.""

"An Israeli company is trying to prove that augmented reality is not only the premise of video games, it can also save lives. iOnRoad is a new mobile application, developed by Picitup, that is "helping smartphone users make smarter driving decisions" by using a phone's camera and GPS."

"Other solutions exist but they sometimes provide minimal time to react - sensors installed on the exterior of the car can tell the driver when to break only when he's a few seconds away from crashing- a distance which most of the time is enough to reduce the impact of the crash but not to prevent it."

""Self-drive cars will probably work through internet connectivity and, just as large volumes of electronic traffic can be routed to overwhelm websites, the opportunity for self-drive traffic being routed to create 'spam jams' or disruption is a very real prospect.""

"Google has launched a webpage where European citizens can request that links to information about them be taken off search results, the first step to comply with a court ruling affirming the "right to be forgotten". The company, which processes more than 90% of all web searches in Europe, has made available a webform through which people can submit their requests but has stopped short of specifying when it will remove links that meet the criteria for being taken down."