What is the metaverse–and what does it mean for business? | McKinsey
“Cathy Hackl: I think it’s important to state that there is really no agreed-upon definition right now. Every morning—it’s become a bit of a ritual—I go to the Merriam-Webster dictionary and type in the word metaverse. And every day it says this word is not in the dictionary.
But if we needed to define it, I tend to have a pretty expansive view of what the metaverse is. I believe it’s a convergence of our physical and digital lives. It’s our digital lifestyles, which we’ve been living on phones or computers, slowly catching up to our physical lives in some way, so that full convergence. It is enabled by many different technologies, like AR [augmented reality] and VR [virtual reality], which are the ones that most people tend to think about. But they’re not the only entry points. There’s also blockchain, which is a big component, there’s 5G, there’s edge computing, and many, many other technologies.
To me, the metaverse is also about our identity and digital ownership. It’s about a new extension of human creativity in some ways. But it’s not going to be like one day we’re going to wake up and exclaim, “The metaverse is here!” It’s going to be an evolution.”
“Activists say that, either way, Marcos did not conduct his campaign fairly. “He flooded social media with historical distortions and refused to engage the media to answer the painful questions that we wanted him to address,” said Ilagan, who said the campaign was based on “trickery and historical distortions”.”
Elon Musk pledges to overturn Twitter’s ban on Donald Trump | Elon Musk | The Guardian
““I would reverse the permanent ban,” Musk said on Tuesday, speaking via video link at a car industry conference organised by the Financial Times.
“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump,” he said. “I think that was a mistake. It alienated the country and did not result in Donald Trump not having a voice.”
“The glasses pick up audio and visual cues, translating them into text that gets displayed on your lens, right in your line of vision. These virtual subtitles overlay on your vision of the world, providing a contextual, USEFUL augmented reality experience that’s leaps and bounds ahead of what the Google Glass was designed to do in 2013.”
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“That ties their hands in how they can treat content related to the killings, they say, and forces them to leave up some content they believe ought to be removed.
“It’s been a month since the massacre and mass graves in Bucha, but this event hasn’t been even designated a ‘violating event’, let alone a hate crime,” said one moderator, who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity. “On that same day there was a shooting in the US, with one fatality and two casualties, and this was declared a violating event within three hours.””
Russia’s trolling on Ukraine gets ‘incredible traction’ on TikTok | Russia | The Guardian
“Russia’s online trolling operation is becoming increasingly decentralised and is gaining “incredible traction” on TikTok with misinformation aimed at sowing doubt over events in Ukraine, a US social media researcher has warned.”
“I’m now realising that complete openness was limiting. Privacy is a cloak, under which we are at liberty to explore the intricacies of the self, beholden to no audience other than ourselves. I have grown up in a generation that overshares in order to be heard. Only through the slow, gruelling process of learning to be private am I really beginning to listen to myself.”
Microsoft Channels ‘Black Mirror’: Turn Deceased People Into Chatbots | IndieWire
“As reported by The Independent this week, Microsoft has been granted a patent that allows the company “to make a chatbot using the personal information of deceased people.” Under the patent, Microsoft can create an artificial intelligence bot “based on images, voice data, social media posts, electronic message, and more personal information” of a deceased person.”
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Google, Meta, and others will have to explain their algorithms under new EU legislation – The Verge
“Early Saturday morning after hours of negotiations, the bloc agreed on the broad terms of the Digital Services Act, or DSA, which will force tech companies to take greater responsibility for content that appears on their platforms. New obligations include removing illegal content and goods more quickly, explaining to users and researchers how their algorithms work, and taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation. Companies face fines of up to six percent of their annual turnover for non-compliance. “
Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel dismisses Facebook’s metaverse as ‘hypothetical’ | Snapchat | The Guardian
“The Snapchat founder, Evan Spiegel, has dismissed Facebook’s “metaverse” ambitions as “ambiguous and hypothetical” as he announced a raft of new augmented reality features coming to phones and Snap’s experimental AR Spectacles over the next year.”
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Facebook struggles as Russia steps up presence in unstable west Africa | World news | The Guardian
“A report by investigators from the Digital Forensic Lab, a global network of digital forensic researchers run by US-based thinktank the Atlantic Council, reveals how pro-Russian Facebook pages in Mali coordinated support for anti-democracy protests and the Wagner group, a controversial Russian private military contractor that was invited into the unstable country last year after the overthrow of President Bah N’daw by the military.”
“A virtual protest has taken place on China’s heavily monitored social media platforms, where netizens took turns to keep a censored video called the Voice of April alive and overwhelm censors.”
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U+237C ? RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW · Jonathan Chan
“Known as right angle with downwards zigzag arrow, angle with down zig-zag arrow, \rangledownzigzagarrow, and ⍼, no one knows what ? is meant to represent or where it originated from. Section 22.7 Technical Symbols from the Unicode Standard on the Miscellaneous Technical block doesn’t say anything about it.”
BBC warns of fake video claiming Ukraine carried out Kramatorsk attack | Ukraine | The Guardian
“The BBC has warned that a video carrying its branding in which it is claimed that a missile attack on a railway station that killed dozens of people was carried out by Ukraine is fake.”
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The creator of Second Life has a lot to say about all these new ‘metaverses’ | PC Gamer
“The problem, he believes, is that total decentralization inevitably increases wealth inequality. He pointed me to a simulation he designed last year in which bouncing balls demonstrate the theory that “the rich actually always get richer, no matter what.” “
“Lawyers for the former president have claimed fair use, saying the ad was satire, exempt from copyright law, and used footage reposted without knowing its origin. They have also said Trump cannot be sued because of “presidential absolute immunity”.”
Thanks to Microsoft, We Can Watch Superman for Thousands of Years | PCMag
“It sounds complicated, but the upside is how robust this write-once storage medium is. Microsoft claims the glass can be boiled in water, baked at 500 degrees in an oven, blasted in a microwave, and demagnetized, but the data it contains will survive. The lifetime is also incredibly long and measured in thousands of years.”
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The latest marketing tactic on LinkedIn: AI-generated faces : NPR
“”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.”
“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).”
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When Good Algorithms Go Sexist: Why and How to Advance AI Gender Equity
“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. “
NBC accused of airbrushing photo of biological male Lia Thomas — Society’s Child — Sott.net
“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.”
Free Technology for Teachers: Stop Printing the Internet
“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 – CNA
“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.”
How Artificial Intelligence Perpetuates Gender Imbalance
“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.”
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“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.”
Moore’s Law: Scientists Just Made a Graphene Transistor Gate the Width of an Atom
“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.””
‘Music is so different now’: Copyright laws need to change, says legal expert | Music | The Guardian
“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.””
AI suggested 40,000 new possible chemical weapons in just six hours – The Verge
“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.”
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Google’s New Soli Radar Tech Can Read Your Body Language—Without Cameras | WIRED
“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.”
Google Play app downloaded more than 10,000 times contained data-stealing RAT | Ars Technica
“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.”
Russian “influencers” recite identical denunciations of Ukraine | Boing Boing
“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.”
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