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Majority of Covid misinformation came from 12 people, report finds | Coronavirus | The Guardian
“The vast majority of Covid-19 anti-vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories originated from just 12 people, a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) cited by the White House this week found.”
- – By dr tech
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How does Apple technology hold up against NSO spyware? | Apple | The Guardian
“The disclosure points to a problem security researchers have been warning about for years: that despite its reputation for building what is seen by millions of customers as a secure product, some believe Apple’s closed culture and fear of negative press have harmed its ability to provide security for those targeted by governments and criminals.
“Apple’s self-assured hubris is just unparalleled,” said Patrick Wardle, a former NSA employee and founder of the Mac security developer Objective-See. “They basically believe that their way is the best way. And to be fair … the iPhone has had incredible success.
“But you talk to any external security researcher, they’re probably not going to have a lot of great things to say about Apple. Whereas if you talk to security researchers in dealing with, say, Microsoft, they’ve said: ‘We’re gonna put our ego aside, and ultimately realise that the security researchers are reporting vulnerabilities that at the end of the day are benefiting our users, because we’re able to patch them.’ I don’t think Apple has that same mindset.””
- – By dr tech
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““Mexico’s capacity to spy on its citizens is immense. [And] it’s extremely easy for the technology and the information obtained through the spyware to fall into private hands – be it organised crime or commercial,” said Jorge Rebolledo, a Mexico City security consultant. “What we know about is only the tip of the iceberg.”
Andrés Manuel López Obrador
Andrés Manuel López Obrador.The data leak is a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, since 2016, are believed to have been selected as belonging to people of interest by government clients of NSO Group.”
- – By dr tech
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I know where your cat lives (privacy and metadata) ^JB – cs4fn
“German Green party MP, Malte Spitz, went a step further and published 6 months of records kept (at the time by law) by his phone company about him. To emphasise how scary it was privacy-wise he published it in the form of a minute by minute interactive map, so anyone could follow his exact location (just like the phone company) as though in real time from the location metadata his phone was giving away all the time. The metadata was combined with his freely available social networking data, allowing anyone to see not just where he was but often what he was doing. Germany no longer requires phone companies to keep this metadata, but other countries have antiterrorist laws that require similar information to be kept for everyone. You can explore Malte’s movements at (archived link: www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention) to get an idea of how your life is being tracked by metadata.”
- – By dr tech
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Tech firm hit by giant ransomware hack gets key to unlock victims’ data | Cybercrime | The Guardian
“Ransomware analysts offered several possible explanations for why the master key has now appeared. It is possible Kaseya, a government entity, or a collective of victims paid the ransom. The Kremlin in Russia also might have seized the key from the criminals and handed it over through intermediaries, experts said.”
- – By dr tech
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“I heard from one political dissident about a suspicious motorcycle parked in front of his London house. When the police checked it out, they found a wifi router connected to the bike’s battery with the same name as his home’s wifi. There’s a name for this attack: “evil twin”.”
- – By dr tech
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
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Can facial analysis technology create a child-safe internet? | Identity cards | The Guardian
“Take Yoti, for instance: the company provides a range of age verification services, partnering with CitizenCard to offer a digital version of its ID, and working with self-service supermarkets to experiment with automatic age recognition of individuals. John Abbott, Yoti’s chief business officer, says the system is already as good as a person at telling someone’s age from a video of them, and has been tested against a wide range of demographics – including age, race and gender – to ensure that it’s not wildly miscategorising any particular group. The company’s most recent report claims that a “Challenge 21” policy (blocking under-18s by asking for strong proof of age from people who look under 21) would catch 98% of 17-year-olds, and 99.15% of 16 year olds, for instance.”
- – By dr tech
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Age verification in three different ways, wherever you need it • Yoti
“How we verify your users
We use a combination of AI technology, liveness anti-spoofing and document authenticity checks so you can be confident in the age of your customers.”
- – By dr tech
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Social networks’ anti-racism policies belied by users’ experience | Race | The Guardian
““The abhorrent racist abuse directed at England players last night has absolutely no place on Twitter,” the social network said on Monday morning. A Facebook spokesperson said similarly: “No one should have to experience racist abuse anywhere, and we don’t want it on Instagram.”
But the statements bore little relation to the experience of the company’s users. On Instagram, where thousands left comments on the pages of Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho, supportive users who tried to flag abuse to the platform were surprised by the response.”
- – By dr tech
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What’s artificial intelligence best at? Stealing human ideas | Technology | The Guardian
” A new AI pair programmer that helps you write better code. It helps you quickly discover alternative ways to solve problems, write tests, and explore new APIs without having to tediously tailor a search for answers on the internet. As you type, it adapts to the way you write code – to help you complete your work faster.
In other words, Copilot will sit on your computer and do a chunk of your coding work for you. There’s a long-running joke in the coding community that a substantial portion of the actual work of programming is searching online for people who’ve solved the same problems as you, and copying their code into your program. Well, now there’s an AI that will do that part for you.”
- – By dr tech
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“This type of extreme racist post was frequently met with pushback from the community. Common responses included; “people should be treated as individuals not as part of a group” and “the Democrats are the ones who want to divide us up by race”. Implicit or explicit gestures of antisemitism were strongly protested by evangelical Christians. Red-pill posts would rarely stay up long. In most cases, they were only intended to appear in one’s Instagram feed and to vanish shortly after. The account would then resume posting popular content, wait another week and try it again. This process would continue for months, maybe a year. By posting mainstream conservative content most of the time, these extreme-right groups were able to build up an audience numbering in the range of 30,000 to 40,000, which they could then incrementally expose to radical content.”
- – By dr tech
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Facebook says Iran-based hackers used site to target US military personnel | Facebook | The Guardian
“Facebook said on Thursday it had taken down about 200 accounts run by a group of hackers in Iran as part of a cyber-spying operation that targeted mostly US military personnel and people working at defense and aerospace companies.
The social media company said the group, dubbed “Tortoiseshell” by security experts, used fake online personas to connect with targets, build trust – sometimes over the course of several months – and drive them to other sites, where they were tricked into clicking malicious links that would infect their devices with spying malware.”
- – By dr tech
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“Despite Neville describing his use of AI technology as a “modern storytelling technique”, critics voiced concerns on social media over the unannounced use of a “deepfake” voice to say sentences that Bourdain never spoke.
Among those upset with the use of AI was Bourdain’s ex-wife Ottavia Bourdain. She disputed Neville’s claims that he had received her blessing to use the artificial technology, tweeting: “I certainly was NOT the one who said Tony would have been cool with that.””
- – By dr tech
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
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“Instead, the robots are here not to replace this lower tier of underpaid and undervalued work. They are here to smugly sit in the middle, monitoring and surveilling us, hiring and firing us. Amazon has recently replaced its middle management and human resources workers with artificial intelligence to determine when a worker has outlived their usefulness and needs to be let go. There is no human to appeal to, no negotiating with a bot. “
- – By dr tech
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Trump says he will sue social media giants over ‘censorship’ | Donald Trump | The Guardian
““But this is the lead, and I think it’s going to be a very, very important game changer for our country. It will be a pivotal battle in the defense of the first amendment and, in the end, I am confident that we will achieve a historic victory for American freedom and at the same time, freedom of speech.”
The lawsuit faces tough odds. Under a law known as Section 230, internet companies are generally allowed to moderate their content by removing posts that, for instance, are obscene or violate the services’ own standards, so long as they are acting in “good faith”.”
- – By dr tech
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
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“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.”
- – By dr tech
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“A study last year of 3.1 million workers in North America, Europe and the Middle East found “significant and durable increases” in both the average number of emails sent internally, and the number of recipients. By measuring the time between the first and last emails sent (or meetings attended) in a 24-hour period, the researchers concluded that, since the pandemic, the average workday had extended by 48.5 minutes.”
- – By dr tech
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Cops are playing music during filmed encounters to game YouTube’s copyright striking – Culture
“The police are attempting to use YouTube’s stringent copyright system to keep people from posting recordings of encounters with law enforcement.
In a video posted Thursday by the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP), a community organization dedicated to defunding the Oakland Police Department, Alameda County Sheriff’s deputy David Shelby pulled out his phone and began playing Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” during an encounter. He openly admitted, “it can’t be posted to YouTube.””
- – By dr tech
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
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“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.”
- – By dr tech
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Egypt sentences TikTok star to 10 years in prison for ‘human trafficking’
“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.”
- – By dr tech
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
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Big Brother is still watching you and he goes by the name Facebook | John Naughton | The Guardian
“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.”
- – By dr tech
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“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?
- – By dr tech
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
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“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].”
- – By dr tech
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Apple’s new ‘private relay’ feature to be withheld in China | Apple | The Guardian
“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.”
- – By dr tech
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Fastly says single customer triggered bug behind mass internet outage | Internet | The Guardian
“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.”
- – By dr tech
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El Salvador becomes first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender | El Salvador | The Guardian
“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.”
- – By dr tech
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How the FBI’s Trojan Shield operation exposed a criminal underworld | Financial Times
“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.”
- – By dr tech
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World’s biggest meat producer JBS pays $11m cybercrime ransom | Food & drink industry | The Guardian
“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.”
- – By dr tech
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
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Amid a Pandemic, a Health Care Algorithm Shows Promise and Peril
“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. “
- – By dr tech
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Gadgets have stopped working together, and it’s becoming an issue | Smartphones | The Guardian
“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.”
- – By dr tech
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“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.”
- – By dr tech
-
“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.”
- – By dr tech
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Amazon US customers have one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing | Amazon | The Guardian
“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.”
- – By dr tech
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The empty office: what we lose when we work from home | Anthropology | The Guardian
“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”.”
- – By dr tech
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““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.”
- – By dr tech
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Microsoft blocks Bing from showing image results for Tiananmen ‘tank man’ | Bing | The Guardian
“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.”
- – By dr tech
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
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Tim Cook’s Fortnite trial testimony was unexpectedly revealing – The Verge
The longest running legal dispute in tech is almost over.
- – By circuititgs
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“So here’s where we are: an online system has been running wild for years, generating billions in profits for its participants. We have evidence of its illegitimacy and a powerful law on the statute book that in principle could bring it under control, but which we appear unable to enforce. And the only body that has, to date, been able to exert real control over the aforementioned racket is… a giant private company that itself is subject to serious concerns about its monopolistic behaviour. And the question for today: where is democracy in all this? You only have to ask to know the answer.”
- – By dr tech
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New brain-computer interface writes up to 90 characters per minute with your thoughts | Boing Boing
“With this BCI, our study participant, whose hand was paralysed from spinal cord injury, achieved typing speeds of 90 characters per minute with 94.1% raw accuracy online, and greater than 99% accuracy offline with a general-purpose autocorrect.”
- – By dr tech
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Ban Facial Recognition in Stores
“Imagine a store showing you targeted advertising based on the products you look at but never buy — or even personalized pricing based on a perception of your income once they’ve identified you. Or a store scanning the faces of everyone approaching the building, barring anyone with a criminal record from entering. These nightmare scenarios are terrifying precisely because they are so plausible.”
- – By dr tech
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“A “massive anti-vaccination campaign” has been cited by the European Commission as a reason for social media platforms to intensify their factchecking and revise the internal algorithms that can amplify disinformation.
Under a revised code of practice proposed by Brussels, companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter would need to show why particular material is disseminated and prove that false information is being blocked.”
- – By dr tech
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New cryptocurrency Chia blamed for hard drive shortages | Cryptocurrencies | The Guardian
“But Chia’s replacement for bitcoin’s energy-intensive “proof of work” system, called “proof of space and time”, instead requires users to devote massive amounts of hard drive space to generating and storing random numbers, with rewards doled out to those with the most space used up”
- – By dr tech
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What Instagram really learned from hiding like counts – The Verge
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Facebook lifts ban on posts claiming Covid-19 was man-made | Facebook | The Guardian
“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”.”
- – By dr tech
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
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The Colonial Pipeline Hack Is a New Extreme for Ransomware | WIRED
“”This is the largest impact on the energy system in the United States we’ve seen from a cyberattack, full stop,” says Rob Lee, CEO of the critical-infrastructure-focused security firm Dragos. Aside from the financial impact on Colonial Pipeline or the many providers and customers of the fuel it transports, Lee points out that around 40 percent of US electricity in 2020 was produced by burning natural gas, more than any other source. That means, he argues, that the threat of cyberattacks on a pipeline presents a significant threat to the civilian power grid. “You have a real ability to impact the electric system in a broad way by cutting the supply of natural gas. This is a big deal,” he adds. “I think Congress is going to have questions. A provider got hit with ransomware from a criminal act, this wasn’t even a state-sponsored attack, and it impacted the system in this way?””
- – By dr tech
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Joe Biden’s Venmo account discovered in ‘less than 10 minutes’ – report | Joe Biden | The Guardian
“BuzzFeed said it took “less than 10 minutes” to find Biden’s account, “using only a combination of the app’s built-in search tool and public friends feature”.
“In the process,” it said, it “found nearly a dozen Biden family members and mapped out a social web that encompasses not only the first family but a wide network of people around them, including the president’s children, grandchildren, senior White House officials and all of their contacts on Venmo.””
- – By dr tech
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Citizen app’s $30k reward strays towards vigilante justice | Boing Boing
“Fear-mongering Citizen app apparently stepped up from crime pronouncement to vigilantism this weekend when they offered a $30k reward for information about a gentleman they believed to be an arsonist responsible for starting a large fire.
It is pretty clear local law enforcement didn’t ask for this assistance and that sharing of the photo could easily have endangered the “suspect,” or in this case victim, especially as requested in the quote below.”
- – By dr tech
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“Ring is effectively building the largest corporate-owned, civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen. An estimated 400,000 Ring devices were sold in December 2019 alone, and that was before the across-the-board boom in online retail sales during the pandemic. Amazon is cagey about how many Ring cameras are active at any one point in time, but estimates drawn from Amazon’s sales data place yearly sales in the hundreds of millions. The always-on video surveillance network extends even further when you consider the millions of users on Ring’s affiliated crime reporting app, Neighbors, which allows people to upload content from Ring and non-Ring devices.”
- – By dr tech
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Citizen: crime app falsely accused a homeless man of starting a wildfire | Technology | The Guardian
“But that was not before the falsely accused man had his name and image widely shared. The alert sent by Citizen contained a photo and was seen by more than 861,000 people. It read: “Citizen is offering a $30,000 reward to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest of the arson suspect.”
Citizen told the Guardian in a statement it offered the cash reward “without formal coordination with the appropriate agencies”.
“Once we realized this error, we immediately retracted the photo and reward offer,” it said. “We are actively working to improve our internal processes to ensure this does not occur again. This was a mistake we are taking very seriously.””
- – By dr tech
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School’s out: Pakistani pupils struggle with lack of internet | Global development | The Guardian
“Iqbal Khan works as a chauffeur in Lahore. His children are in his home village in a rural area north of Peshawar. Both of these very different areas of Pakistan have the same problem for many of their young people: no means of getting access to an education.
Online learning was not an option for Khan’s children as the pandemic locked down schools across cities and countryside. Even as he worked to pay the school fees, his two sons, aged 16 and 13, were unable to access any lessons as their schools went digital.”
- – By dr tech
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How to Solve Captchas—and Why They’ve Gotten So Hard | WIRED
“It can be a tricky balance, especially as machines become more sophisticated.
“Usually artificial intelligence systems are capable of coping better than humans because, as an example, they don’t suffer from annoyance. They are infinitely patient, they don’t care about wasting time,” says Mauro Migliardi, associate professor at the University of Padua in Italy. He recently coauthored a paper summarizing 20 years of captcha versions and their effectiveness.”
- – By dr tech
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
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