Flim: a New AI-Powered Movie-Screenshot Search Engine | Open Culture
“Described on its about page as “a constantly evolving database of HD screenshots,” with a claim of 50,000 provided daily, Flim uses artificial intelligence to perform color analysis and detect “objects, clothes, characters, etc.””
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability | Electronic Frontier Foundation
“A new regime of interoperability can revitalize competition in the space, encourage innovation, and give users more agency over their data; it may also create new risks to user privacy and data security. This paper considers those risks and argues that they are outweighed by the benefits. New interoperability, done correctly, will not just foster competition, it can be a net benefit for user privacy rights.”
Amazon’s driver monitoring app is an invasive nightmare
“Mentor is made by eDriving, which describes the app on its website as a “smartphone-based solution that collects and analyzes driver behaviors most predictive of crash risk and helps remediate risky behavior by providing engaging, interactive micro-training modules delivered directly to the driver in the smartphone app.”
But CNBC talked to drivers who said the app mostly invades their privacy or miscalculates dangerous driving behavior. One driver said even though he didn’t answer a ringing phone, the app docked points for using a phone while driving. Another worker was flagged for distracted driving at every delivery stop she made. The incorrect tracking has real consequences. ranging from restricted payouts and bonuses to job loss. “
Inside the Making of Facebook’s Supreme Court | The New Yorker
“This kind of muddy uncertainty seemed inevitable. The board has jurisdiction over every Facebook user in the world, but intuitions about freedom of speech vary dramatically across political and cultural divides. In Hong Kong, where the pro-democracy movement has used social media to organize protests, activists rely on Facebook’s free-expression principles for protection against the state. In Myanmar, where hate speech has contributed to a genocide against the Rohingya, advocates have begged for stricter enforcement. “
Facebook v Apple: the looming showdown over data tracking and privacy | Technology | The Guardian
“Some time in the next few months, iPhone users will be greeted by a message – not from Facebook, but from Apple – asking them if they will allow the Facebook app to collect their data. If users refuse, Apple will prevent Facebook from doing so.
Facebook’s attempt to vilify Apple looks like sour grapes
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A similar message from Apple will pop up, related to any app that collects data on users for advertising purposes.
Facebook says it will preempt the change by rolling out a pop-up screen over the coming weeks and months, making a plea to users to stay opted in.
“Agreeing to these prompts doesn’t result in Facebook collecting new types of data; it just means that Facebook can continue to give people better experiences,” a Facebook spokeswoman said.”
“n the never-ending calls for Twitter to better police its platform, the words of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer from 170 years ago remain relevant: “Every article, even in a newspaper, should be accompanied by the name of its author… so that when a man publicly proclaims through the far-sounding trumpet of the newspaper, he should be answerable for it, at any rate with his honour, if he has any; and if he has none, let his name neutralise the effect of his words… the result of such a measure would be to put an end to two-thirds of the newspaper lies, and to restrain the audacity of many a poisonous tongue.””
“John became increasingly radicalised by an online barrage of far-right disinformation. “Posts of homeless British soldiers were set against Muslim families being given free homes. Now I know the posts were all fake, but the 15-year-old me didn’t bother to fact-check.”
The worry is that John’s contemporaries won’t either. A surge of online extremism and disinformation has arrived at a time of lockdown-induced isolation, loneliness and home-schooling, creating what police call a “perfect storm”. One British far-right group has even started pushing an alternative white-supremacist school curriculum for lockdown learning.”
Debate rages as Facebook prepares to say whether Trump can return | Technology | The Guardian
“The decision will be the most consequential yet made by Facebook’s Oversight Board, a group of 20 members who range from humanitarian activists and religious experts to lawyers and a former prime minister. The board, which launched in late 2020, is meant to function as an independent arm of the social platform, making binding decisions on a selection of its thorniest content moderation issues.”
“SINGAPORE: Personal information of about 129,000 Singtel customers was stolen after a recent data breach of a third-party file sharing system, the local telco said on Wednesday (Feb 17).
Singtel has completed initial investigations into the breach and established which files on the Accellion file transfer appliance (FTA) were accessed illegally, the company said in a news release.”
In Hong Kong, this AI reads children’s emotions as they learn – CNN
“The software, 4 Little Trees, was created by Hong Kong-based startup Find Solution AI. While the use of emotion recognition AI in schools and other settings has caused concern, founder Viola Lam says it can make the virtual classroom as good as — or better than — the real thing.
Students work on tests and homework on the platform as part of the school curriculum. While they study, the AI measures muscle points on their faces via the camera on their computer or tablet, and identifies emotions including happiness, sadness, anger, surprise and fear. “
“Inoculating people from misinformation and tackling the “infodemic” are key to fighting the coronavirus. Tang, Taiwan’s first transgender government minister and a self-described “civic hacker”, has done this by fostering digital democracy: using technology to encourage civic participation and build consensus.
Tang has also quashed faked news by implementing a 2-2-2 “humour over rumour” strategy. A response to misinformation is provided within 20 minutes, in 200 words or fewer, alongside two fun images. Early in the pandemic, for example, people were panic-buying toilet paper because of a rumour that it was being used to manufacture face masks; supplies were running out. So, the Taiwanese premier, Su Tseng-chang, released a cartoon of him wiggling his bum, with a caption saying: “We only have one pair of buttocks.” It sounds silly, but it went viral. Humour can be far more effective than serious fact-checking.”
“While the ban was only meant to target Australian news publishers, dozens of pages run by key government agencies, community pages, union pages, charity organisations and politicians were also blocked for several hours.”
Facebook announces UK trial to tackle climate misinformation | Environment | The Guardian
“Facebook has said it will start labelling misinformation about the climate crisis in a small trial limited to the UK.
Labels will be attached to certain posts directing users to Facebook’s Climate Science Information Center, a repository of fact-checked claims about the environment.
The company has not yet said how it will decide which posts receive the label, but the process is similar to that used in the US election when it attempted to algorithmically discern posts that shared common myths or misconceptions, and appended a link taking users to a “voting information centre”.”
Pluralistic: 17 Feb 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
“”Dehumanisation and intensification of work is not inevitable…In other words, we must make sure the robots work for us, and not the other way around.””
Why hot new social app Clubhouse spells nothing but trouble | Social media | The Guardian
“So, are you on Clubhouse, the social-media sensation du jour? No? Me neither. But – I hasten to add, lest there should be any doubt about my social status – that’s not because I wasn’t invited to join. A generous friend had a few invitations to extend, and she offered me one. After that, she had an attack of what one can only describe as donor’s remorse, because in order to be able to extend the invitation to me she had to grant Clubhouse access to all her contacts!”
How Oracle Sells Repression in China
“POLICE IN CHINA’S Liaoning province were sitting on mounds of data collected through invasive means: financial records, travel information, vehicle registrations, social media, and surveillance camera footage. To make sense of it all, they needed sophisticated analytic software. Enter American business computing giant Oracle, whose products could find relevant data in the police department’s disparate feeds and merge it with information from ongoing investigations.”
Drug companies look to AI to end ‘hit and miss’ research | Pharmaceuticals industry | The Guardian
“Functional genomics – a new area of science that looks at why small changes in a person’s genetic make-up can increase the risk of diseases – deals with huge datasets. Each person has about 30,000 genes, which can be combined with others, as Hal Barron, GSK’s chief scientific officer, explains. “You start to realise you’re dealing with trillions and trillions of data points, even per experiment, and no human can interpret that, it’s just too complicated.””
I helped build ByteDance’s censorship machine – Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech
“My job was to use technology to make the low-level content moderators’ work more efficient. For example, we created a tool that allowed them to throw a video clip into our database and search for similar content.
When I was at ByteDance, we received multiple requests from the bases to develop an algorithm that could automatically detect when a Douyin user spoke Uyghur, and then cut off the livestream session. The moderators had asked for this because they didn’t understand the language. Streamers speaking ethnic languages and dialects that Mandarin-speakers don’t understand would receive a warning to switch to Mandarin.”
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
Are we trapped in our own web bubbles? – BBC News
“Is the internet entering the era of personalisation, where web firms know so much about us that they are able to serve us up a view of the world which is like looking in the mirror?”
This is how we lost control of our faces | MIT Technology Review
“Raji says her investigation into the data has made her gravely concerned about deep-learning-based facial recognition.
“It’s so much more dangerous,” she says. “The data requirement forces you to collect incredibly sensitive information about, at minimum, tens of thousands of people. It forces you to violate their privacy. That in itself is a basis of harm. And then we’re hoarding all this information that you can’t control to build something that likely will function in ways you can’t even predict. That’s really the nature of where we’re at.””
9 scary revelations from 40 years of facial recognition research
“The gulf between how well facial recognition performs in academic settings vs. real world applications is vast.”
The Terrifying Results of a New AI Study | by Ella Alderson | Predict | Feb, 2021 | Medium
“Over the years critics have pointed out their many shortcomings as well. Perhaps the biggest flaw of all is that the laws are vague. If machines become so human that we find it difficult to tell them and us apart, how will a machine tell the difference? Where does humanity end and artificial intelligence begin? And even if an AI can distinguish itself from a human being, we also cannot know what loopholes and reprogramming a robot is capable of. Surely an AI more clever than us could plan a way to access its core and bypass any of its existing limitations.”
“But the movement to legally protect leisure time is gaining ground. The European parliament voted overwhelmingly last month in favour of a resolution calling on the European commission to propose a law allowing those who work digitally to disconnect outside their working hours.”
“Launched in 2006, 23andMe sells tests to determine consumers’ genetic ancestry and risk of developing certain illnesses, using saliva samples sent in by mail.
Privacy advocates and researchers have long raised concerns about a for-profit company owning the genetic data of millions of people, fears that have only intensified with news of the partnership.”
‘I get better sleep’: the people who quit social media | Life and style | The Guardian
“y memory and recall are alarmingly good – borderline photographic. But when I used Instagram, I found it would short-circuit my recall in an alarming way. I’d be describing something mid-sentence and I’d just stop speaking, unable to finish. So I rarely use it.
But my attention span – and my posture, eyes and sleep – are still being degraded by other technology and my dependence on it. In my pandemic life, technology is a lifeline – 90% of my social and work life happens on one of four screens.”
“Researchers showed detectors can be defeated by inserting inputs called adversarial examples into every video frame. The adversarial examples are slightly manipulated inputs which cause artificial intelligence systems such as machine learning models to make a mistake. In addition, the team showed that the attack still works after videos are compressed.”
With AI translation service that rivals professionals, Lengoo attracts new $20M round – TechCrunch
“Most people who use AI-powered translation tools do so for commonplace, relatively unimportant tasks like understanding a single phrase or quote. Those basic services won’t do for an enterprise offering technical documents in 15 languages — but Lengoo’s custom machine translation models might just do the trick. And with a new $20 million B round, they may be able to build a considerable lead.
The translation business is a big one, in the billions, and isn’t going anywhere. It’s simply too common a task to need to release a document, piece of software or live website in multiple languages — perhaps dozens.”
“”When a new technology comes to town, we have choices about how to use it,” he said. “It doesn’t necessarily need to broadcast propaganda, [and] it doesn’t have to become a commercial free-for-all. Instead, we can look at a new technology and invent something new.””
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
This Machine Was Built To Give You Nightmares | FiveThirtyEight
“We seem to be safe for the moment, however — the MIT team said it has no interest in taking artificially intelligent horror machines to the next level or exploring their darker possibilities. “We wanted to playfully commemorate humanity’s fear of AI, which is a growing theme in popular culture, but we currently have no plans to use the immense power of AI to scare people further,” Yanardag said. “The world is already pretty scary!””
Dating apps are refuges for Egypt’s LGBTQ community, but they can also be a trap – The Verge
After You Die, Microsoft Wants to Resurrect You as a Chatbot
“Last month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted a patent to Microsoft that outlines a process to create a conversational chatbot of a specific person using their social data. In an eerie twist, the patent says the chatbot could potentially be inspired by friends or family members who are deceased, which is almost a direct plot of a popular episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror.”
Facebook and Apple Are Beefing Over the Future of the Internet | WIRED
““The fact is that an interconnected ecosystem of companies and data brokers, of purveyors of fake news and peddlers of division, of trackers and hucksters just looking to make a quick buck, is more present in our lives than it has ever been,” he said. “Technology does not need vast troves of personal data, stitched together across dozens of websites and apps, in order to succeed.””
“It’s hard to incentivise profit-driven companies to change their services according to specific needs while maintaining them free and accessible for all.”
The internet tricked me into believing I can multitask
“The internet and its progeny, like smart car dashboards and buzzing smartphones, are built to make it seem like they can help us multitask, but our brains just aren’t cut out for it.
“It leads us to try to engage in multiple information-demanding activities simultaneously, and that is what our brains just do not do very well. They weren’t evolved for that very type of demand,” said Gazzaley, who also wrote The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World.”
New ‘Liquid’ AI Learns Continuously From Its Experience of the World
“Whereas most machine learning algorithms can’t hone their skills beyond an initial training period, the researchers say the new approach, called a liquid neural network, has a kind of built-in “neuroplasticity.” That is, as it goes about its work—say, in the future, maybe driving a car or directing a robot—it can learn from experience and adjust its connections on the fly.”
“Given everything the Pacific, and the world, have sacrificed this pandemic, a forum reduced to a virtual meeting is far from the greatest loss. But it is already having consequences, with threats from some countries to abandon the forum altogether because of a lack of consensus over who, now, will lead it.”
“Researchers fed these algorithms (which function like autocomplete, but for images) pictures of a man cropped below his neck: 43% of the time the image was autocompleted with the man wearing a suit. When you fed the same algorithm a similarly cropped photo of a woman, it auto-completed her wearing a low-cut top or bikini a massive 53% of the time. For some reason, the researchers gave the algorithm a picture of the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and found that it also automatically generated an image of her in a bikini. (After ethical concerns were raised on Twitter, the researchers had the computer-generated image of AOC in a swimsuit removed from the research paper.)”
““The code reasonably attempts to address the bargaining power imbalance between digital platforms and Australian news businesses,” he said.
Google’s search engine not as good as its competitors for news, research finds
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“It also recognises the important role search plays, not only to consumers but to the thousands of Australian small businesses that rely on search and advertising technology to fund and support their organisations.”
The code, which is currently before the parliament, would facilitate negotiations between media companies and digital platforms – currently just Facebook and Google – for payment for content. If an agreement cannot be reached, then it goes to an arbiter for resolution.”
Myanmar orders Internet providers to block Facebook services – CNA
“YANGON: Internet providers in Myanmar including state-owned telecom MPT were blocking access to Facebook-owned services in the country on Thursday (Feb 4), days after military leaders seized power in a coup.”
Spam’s new frontier? Now even spinach can send emails | Vegetables | The Guardian
“It means the specially engineered spinach has embedded within its leaf mesophyll single-walled carbon nanotubes capable of fluorescing with an intensity relative to the level of nitroaromatics taken up by the roots. And then it sends an email.”
Germany seizes US$60 million of bitcoin – now, where’s the password? – CNA
“Bitcoin is stored on software known as a digital wallet that is secured through encryption. A password is used as a decryption key to open the wallet and access the bitcoin. When a password is lost the user cannot open the wallet.
The fraudster had been sentenced to more than two years in jail for covertly installing software on other computers to harness their power to “mine” or produce bitcoin.
When he went behind bars, his bitcoin stash would have been worth a fraction of the current value. The price of bitcoin has surged over the past year, hitting a record high of US$42,000 in January. It was trading at US$37,577 on Friday, according to cryptocurrency and blockchain website Coindesk.”
Android devices ensnared in DDoS botnet | ZDNet
“Netlab researchers, who are usually among the firsts to discover emerging botnets, said the botnet contains several clues to suggest this is the work of the same group which developed the Moobot botnet in 2019 and the LeetHozer botnet in 2020.
Both botnets were essentially built and used for launching DDoS attacks, which also appears to be Matryosh’s primary function, as well.
The Netlab team says they found functions in the code specific to features that will use infected devices to launch DDoS attacks via protocols like TCP, UDP, and ICMP.”
Opinion | They Stormed the Capitol. Their Apps Tracked Them. – The New York Times
“Surrendering our privacy to the government would be foolish enough. But what is more insidious is the Faustian bargain made with the marketing industry, which turns every location ping into currency as it is bought and sold in the marketplace of surveillance advertising.
Now, one year later, we’re in a very similar position. But it’s far worse.
A source has provided another data set, this time following the smartphones of thousands of Trump supporters, rioters and passers-by in Washington, D.C., on January 6, as Donald Trump’s political rally turned into a violent insurrection. At least five people died because of the riot at the Capitol. Key to bringing the mob to justice has been the event’s digital detritus: location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing.”
Inside Robinhood, the free trading app at the heart of the GameStop mania – CNN
“Robinhood’s free-trading revolution helped pave the way to the recent Reddit mayhem on Wall Street.
The rise of Robinhood means that the ability to buy stocks, on a whim, is now at everyone’s fingertips. Robinhood has opened investing up to the masses.
Rival online brokerages were forced to mimic Robinhood’s zero-commission business model, and some joined forces just to survive. “
Posted from Diigo. The rest of ITGSonline group favorite links are here.
Over the years, new trends, technology and the development of new systems have allowed for the possibility of a future where you own nothing. This is due to a change in what it means to have Intellectual Property, and who even needs it.
Creative Industry
For the average day to day person, Intellectual Property might seem a distant issue, especially if they don’t do much when it comes to creating content. However, once you make a step towards content creation, that is music production, graphic design, video editing, scripting or anything that requires creativity, Intellectual Property and Copyright suddenly becomes a problem that either has to be worked around or prevents your success.
As it currently stands, only the content creator has the right of ownership to their produced work as well as the ability to re-produce that work. To be able to use someone else’s work you either have to pay for the right or follow the rules of Fair Use, ultimately limiting the ability a creator has over using pre-existing content in their work.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) exists to allow copyright rules to extend to digital media, as the creation of Copyright existed far before digital media became commonly used. Thanks to DRM, people and companies can have copyright ownership of digital media such as songs, videos and video games.
Streaming
Spotify Premium, Spotify’s subscription based streaming service, allows users to download up to 3333 songs on a single device. However, although users can access all 3333 downloaded songs, they have ownership of none of them. This is in stark contrast to CDs, where as soon as you bought the CD, you immediately had ownership over it. This change in what it means to purchase something is just the start when it comes to the end of ownership.
However, the natural benefit to streaming is that as long as you have an internet connection, you can access as many songs as you’d like that exists on that streaming platform whereas with CDs, you only had access to the CDs you owned. Unfortunately, this comes with a trade off, as almost every streaming service’s marketing model requires them to track the media you play, listen or watch, raising issues surrounding your Privacy & Anonimity, since where listening to a CD alone
meant you were truly alone, you’re never alone when you use streaming services.
Software as a Service
In 2012, Adobe began a 5 year transition towards Software as a service, which would eventually grant access to the entire Creative Suite on a subscription based service but remove the user’s ownership by having all apps centrally hosted. By centrally hosting the apps, Adobe now provided the user access to the software, rather than having the user simply acces it themselves after buying the software.
One thing that both Spotify Premium and Adobe’s Creative Cloud is the usage of micropayments, which is crucial as it means as soon as the user stops paying for the subscription, they no longer have access to any of their downloaded songs on Spotify or the software they installed through Creative Cloud. However, while a user is subscribed, they have full access to the service anywhere with an internet connection, which in conjunction with reasonably affordable micropayments allows for Globalisation and Cultural Diversity.
However, both Spotify and Adobe’s new systems create new challenges that didn’t exist before. Where previously, once a CD was owned by you it became your responsibility and would be kept at your house, streaming services such as Spotify and SAAS are hosted at cloud server farms, which creates a new form of security issue beyond simply having someone break into your house with the security of the company’s servers.
Modern technology and societal development have started the transition of what ownership means, in regards to intellectual property, and whether it truly is needed, wanted, or useful to a capitalist society. Is the public’s opinion
Disney Sucks
It’s important that the following terms are understood by readers, though I doubt they will be important in the future;
Intellectual Property: Ideas, works, or anything created by someone, that is able to be seen or heard, which they are able to copyright, examples such as music, research, and books.
Copyright: The legal protection that intellectual property owners have on their works production and copying, can be given or bought from the owner.
Fair Use and Public Domain: Property that anyone can use, regardless of what it is, for Fair use, it must either comment on, criticize, or parody the property. Anything that no longer has standing copyright attached to it is public domain, and can be used by anyone.
Copyright was put into place around the 1800s, and the purpose of it at the time was to encourage artists and creators to continue their work, as the prevention of theft and stealing of ideas would make it seem worth the time and money investment to creators, which was beneficial to science, art, music, and many other communities and industries, as it allowed any small or large group to protect their work. However, in the modern era, effective and honest copyright usage is rarely used by the normal person, instead abused by giant media corporations and occasionally by artists. The prime example of this is Disney, who infamously have put effort into changing copyright laws, whilst originally they only lasted 20 years, to allow creators to make a profit, now, they last the creators lifetime plus around 50 years. Their abuse of copyright has allowed them to keep their works safe for longer than most people will live, as if their works fall under public domain, they know they will make no profit off of it, which is ironic given the fact that a majority of their movies are “inspired” from Fairy Tales from Europe and elsewhere. Disney’s, and other companies’, manipulations of copyright laws have turned copyright into a tool for rich and powerful to use to keep themselves rich and powerful, keeping a permanent monopoly on the created product, rather than the temporary monopoly planned in the original version of copyright laws. Disney themselves and other corporations seem reliant on the usage of copyright and public domain to keep themselves running, as if copyright was shorter, and their work fell into public domain, they wouldn’t make as much money, and then other people would be able to profit off of their works in the public domain, like how Disney have with their Fairy Tale Movies.
The rise of internet piracy could be a response to the increasingly restrictive copyright laws, and the increasing availability and freedom of piracy. As the copyright laws around the world becoming increasingly restrictive, and less content falls under public domain, less people will be able to create with the content in the culture around them, which is a major issue in most forms of media, as work is often reliant on and builds off of other pieces of work. Such as music, which has remixes, covers, and other forms that use another song or collection of songs to create something new. Nowadays, remixes and covers are often difficult to produce due to the nature of copyright, where musicians are required to ask for or purchase permissions to use songs directly from the music owner, which is another issue that I’ll bring up later. The purchase of permissions for music creates a barrier for less affluent or profitable musicians, and prevents the creation of new music, especially in amateur music. The moderation of copywritten media has resulted in many viewers, listeners and so on to illegally pirate or download media, either to experience for free, or to utilize for themselves, Simply because the cost to view or listen to media becomes higher as monopolies are formed in these media forms. The resulting expected response of piracy is understandable, as why would you purchase an overpriced license, or overpriced download fee, that would go directly to a CEO or manager rather than the people who worked on it.
The major issue of copyright in music media is the actual idea of who owns the music, as often new or aspiring musicians will be ‘recruited’ by record labels in order to grow their audience, and by doing so, relinquish their rights to own the copyright of their music. Record Labels are successful in modern eras due to the profits they make off of musicians, by selling their music and copyright permissions directly, and giving musicians a cut off profits, whilst providing equipment and benefits such as advertisement, audio equipment and so on. Record labels are an example of copyright becoming a separate thing from ownership, as similarly to video and film, the copyright is separated from the people who directly worked on it, and instead owned by major corporations and businesses, who often provide very little contribution to the music compared to the artists. However, in more modern eras, where digital media is becoming more prevalent, smaller musicians have been able to make profits off of their music whilst still keeping their rights to them. For example, using websites like Bandcamp that directly support the musicians, allowing musicians to keep their rights to music and keep profits. Another method used, is to display them on websites such as YouTube, which allows them to make smaller profits than selling them directly, due to the fact that they can be viewed and listened to for free, however, they are spread to a much wider audience, due to the nature of them being free. Which allows the musicians to receive profits from advertisements from YouTube, and also listeners may be inclined to purchase the music if they enjoy it enough.
The rise of digital media sources can be viewed as a separation of music ownership, both for the fact that artists tend to make their music or creations available freely, and the fact that music and other media are pirated illegally more often. At the same time, the ownership and copyright have moved away from the artists and creators and towards big companies and corporations, who keep the copyright for ludicrous periods of time due to the mangled mess that copyright has become. Copyright has become something utilized mainly by corporations, and at the same time something often ignored or unused by creators and most of the populations.
Let’s start with defining Intellectual Property , it refers to creations of the mind , such as inventions , literary and artistic works , designs and symbols , names and images used in various industries from software to creative. But can you make money out of it? Yes, by selling the digital ownership of it which gives permission to access and/or use it. This ownership also lets the creator grant or revoke rights on these data. The sum of all the intellectual property . The sum of the stored data about intellectual property is called digital data treasure.
Now , staring with an example , the most frequent one we encounter in our daily lives is, buying things on Amazon , iTunes , people perceive that buying things digitally is no different except from it doesn’t occupy physical space . But this isn’t true , digital media has certain limitations too . You are only licensing it on some terms that the retailer sets, which usually aren’t even close to ownership.Hence, we don’t really own any of the products we buy digitally any more. Instead, we’re subjected to limitations on our use and handling of those objects that are imposed by both law and technology for example we can’t copy, sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense, or otherwise assign any rights to any third party . A Corporation dictating what you can do with a purchase is not ownership , in 2009 Amazon deleted George Orwell books from user’s devices over a copyright dispute. While in this case, Amazon refunded customers, the fact that they have the ability to erase purchased content from user devices calls ownership in the digital age into question .We have just been living under a misconception , everything we considered a product , has now become a service usually just for a limited time.
You were listening to your own sweet playlist and one song just decides not to play , but rest of the songs are playing perfectly fine ? It might not be a big deal then have you ever wondered why that happened? Blame DRM , which stands for digital rights management . That usually indicates that it is a DRM or a copyright-protected file. But songs on iTunes are no longer DRM protected and Apple Music pays only $0.00735 per play while Spotify pays $0.00437 per play. Which means artists would need hundreds of thousands of streams just to make minimum wages. This is one of the biggest ongoing issues in the music industry which hasn’t been resolved yet. The option of streaming has not only changed the entire relationship between people and music but is being really unfair to the talented and deserving music artists who are going through a financial crisis due to the evolution from Vinyl records ,CDs to a one click away application on any device. But again , the three main stakeholders here are the music artists , the customers and mainly the music streaming companies. It’s true that people are interested in things with a long life span. We cannot continue with the same model of growth in any industry. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment.We lost way too many people before we realized that we could do things differently But doing things differently has its pros and cons . In today’s world, You never really own music, because it’s temporal, so what you own is access to it at a time of your choosing . Unfortunately the only difference between listening to the radio and streaming music , only that it’s your choice, but you don’t own any of it legally. But not every stakeholder despised streaming services, some artists took advantage of it to increase their fanbase. For example , people couldn’t stream Beyoncé’s Lemonade album anywhere but Tidal for the first three years after its release, thanks to an exclusive deal designed to lure all her fans to the streaming service her husband owns.
Now , we have concluded that customers are surely robbed of their ownership of digital media. But what about the creators ? They have been robbed of their own intellectual property. In a world , where subscribing to a service forbids you to copy, lend sell the media due to various streaming media protocols. The same world is prone to Piracy , the term is defined as theft of intellectual property but in simple terms it’s the easy of replicability online , where the original creators lose control over their own property. We will explore different examples where it’s a boon and a blessing.
The state of the music market strongly agrees that people hardly care about ownership of digital files than they do of physical objects. Irrespective of that, Apple and Amazon’s Terms of Service forbid resale or other alienation of music files, they sell them without DRM. DRM hasn’t been used on digital music downloads since 2009. So, technically no streaming service restricts customers from distributing copies of their iTunes or Amazon Music files ,users might not have “ownership rights” but surely have “ownership capabilities” on those files . People can argue on both sides of the court, some say there should be resell rights to avoid piracy , and digital goods should be treated the same as physical goods. At the same time people say digital copies are perfect and publisher’s markets would collapse. Piracy is destroying the careers of artists and bands , recording companies who are already struggling to make their way through in the market. Let’s assume a band called XYZ, has a really minute amount of followers on any of the social media platforms and just 79 views on YouTube , but due to torrent websites illegal strategies , it is known that the band has active 100,000 followers listening and downloading their music ,these false negatives leads to the band is being portrayed felonious , who are unable to earn any bread with integrity ,this not only undermines their business but ruins the capability of a generation of creative people anywhere. Musicians are revolting all round the world to draw attention to the microscopic earnings they make today. They are calling for a reform, transparency, fairness and rights. Social media was used to spread awareness and increase the breadth of this issue using the hashtags #brokenrecord , #antipiracy and #fixstreaming. Piracy is inevitable , but to make it better for the creators of intellectual property like music artists , the government can grant musicians rights to income from streaming, so they can earn a percentage from every stream regardless of the system. This will reduce the growth of defaults in the system like Lily Allen , BitTorrent , etc.
The record labels thought they had turned the tide against piracy , Napster allowed people to easily share their MP3 files, cutting out the record labels and paying little heed to copyright. For a music industry which had long complained that home taping was killing music, this was devastation of a different order. It was followed by similar websites KaZaA and Gnutella and, as the potential of file sharing to undermine the record sales became clear, the music industry’s reaction was quick and brutal, but it had paved the way for other peer-to-peer file-sharing programmes, which continues to plague record labels today
There certainly are some advantages of privacy like globalization, it allows us to discover media that we would’ve otherwise skipped. We can say that piracy is the reason that helped the growth of certain bands and TV show on the map . If it wasn’t for privacy they might have faded away into obscurity . And For some people, Internet piracy is the only way to access products that are otherwise unavailable in their respective countries. This advantage can be termed as self entitlement but on the other hand fairness. I will let your ethical beliefs take care of that .
I just want to end this topic with a question still unanswered, who do you think owns the copyrights of a selfie taken by a monkey provided the owner of the camera was not involved in the above creation. Monkey see, monkey do, but monkey don’t get no copyrights.
A small anecdote
When I first thought of the term “intellectual property”, my immediate thought was of a friend. She’s an artist, and posts her work on social media, where I try and support her as much as possible by for example, retweeting and sharing her posts. And at this point, even I, a very non-creative person, knows that artists on social media- who are mainly freelancers, making money off of commissions and small jobs- hate reposts of their art. I think every other day I see her retweet something about not reposting creative pieces, and she specifically watermarks and says in the captions “DO NOT REPOST”.
Of course, this is the internet, which thirteen year olds and other stupid people are allowed access to. So, one day, my friend came to me and told me that because of a repost, a potential employer to whom she submitted her portfolio to, was unable to verify that a particular piece of art was by her (this was an older piece and there wasn’t a watermark). A repost without credit to her, “innocently” sharing her art, lost her a potential job. She’d lost ownership over her own work.
(Source: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fsciencebusiness.net%2Fnews%2Fcommission-push-improve-enforcement-intellectual-property-rights&psig=AOvVaw1LK9IUIlBTflGTPtRynbma&ust=1611920662596000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CA0QjhxqFwoTCKD56-DGvu4CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD)
Intellectual property is also applicable to many other pieces of media, whether or not as a intuitively creative as art. For example:
–Patents protect inventors from having their work stolen and/or wrongly credited.
–Trade secrets protection allows a company to keep specific information that gives them an advantage against their competitors eg. a recipe for a fast food chain.
–Trademarks protect specific catchphrases or logos that make a company distinguishable.
–Copyright, of which a lot of creative media falls under, especially software.
Some speculate that by 2030, most (if not all) physical objects will be services instead of products, not unlike how software has transformed. The important difference to note between a service and a product, is that once you buy a product (a piece of media), it’s yours and you can do what you want with it. However, with a service, you pay for usually a limited time in micropayments, to have access to the piece of media. For example, buying a movie on a DVD would make it a product, whereas paying for a Netflix subscription and watching the movie with that would make it a service.
Software as a service (SAAS) wasn’t as new of an idea as I once thought it was, the most notable SAAS business transformation being Adobe introducing “Creative Cloud” in April 2012. Until then, Adobe had been doing quite well financially the move was considered risky at the time. Creative Cloud introduced a flat annual rate for access to different software, as opposed to consumers buying physical disks with the software on and downloading it onto their devices. The transition was as gradual as possible, with Adobe only removing the option to buy traditional software in January 2017. At first, since a significant portion of the consumers were freelancers and hobbyists, who didn’t use some of the software included in Creative Cloud, Adobe then introduced subscriptions for individual software, as well as deals for schools and businesses.
Allegedly, Creative Cloud was more secure as data was stored via the cloud, and encrypted. In their security overview, they state:
“Access to services is based on each user’s unique identification, which means that only users entitled to a service may access it. All data transmissions are encrypted and user generated content (UGC) is encrypted at-rest. As detailed in the Dedicated Encryption Key section below, both transmissions and UGC may be additionally encrypted with a dedicated encryption key.”
With the introduction of subscription services and accounts, came the issues with cloud storage, the most applicable ones being:
–Spread of malware (security). With all data being stored on the cloud instead of individual devices, especially with the risk of cloud server farms being the main singular “device” being at threat, it’s easier to spread malware across consumers using the software. Since there’s less physical devices to infect, and with all the software being centrally located somewhere (though perhaps they would have multiple cloud server farms), it puts consumers at risk
–Complete trust in the company and yourself (people and machines, privacy and anonymity). There isn’t much of a way to fully verify that the company isn’t taking advantage of you choosing to store you data on their cloud. Trusting that their encryption methods are “good enough” (which is already quite subjective), and making sure you keep your relevant data safe, would prevent this being such a large issue.
–Data loss (privacy and anonymity, security). An element of this is trusting the company, but in events such as natural disasters (which has happened to Google and Amazon before), would amplify data loss as the cloud isn’t just storing data for one consumer: it’s storing it for many. Storing server farms in physically secure locations can prevent the possibility of this.
Having said this, Adobe have also stated the benefits of cloud storage, mainly being ease of collaboration with other consumers. For artists, this would be a very key part of the user experience, and so this one benefit could potentially balance or outweigh the risks. On top of this, the benefit of frequent and more efficient upgrades to software saves the hassle of constantly downloading new updates for traditional software, which would increase productivity; something critically important for freelancers.
Moreover, Creative Cloud utilises Digital Rights Management, preventing plagarisation of software and maintaining user control. Features of DRM are quite useful for the creative industry in general for collaboration, for example:
-Preventing users from editing your work
-Setting an expiration date for access on a file
-Preventing users from forwarding and printing work
These features are useful, as it prevents work from being stolen in the process of being shared online- very common in this digital age.
(Source: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbelighted.com%2Fsaas-guide-to-software-as-service&psig=AOvVaw1NueR9u1K9Z4wTBxFAuZQ3&ust=1611923515453000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CA0QjhxqFwoTCPDlxZjRvu4CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD)
It’s arguable that a key downside to everything moving to SAAS negatively affects cultural diversity and equality of access as well as employment, mainly because certain services will cause whole industries to be taken over.
“According to the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry, the average amount spent on music in 1999 was $64. But now, there are 96 million subscribers to Spotify alone, which costs $120 a year.”
“Artists can expect to earn between $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream to the holder of music rights. However, according to some data from Information is Beautiful, it puts that number even lower at $0.00437 per play.”
This decreases cultural diversity, as artists don’t have a money incentive to be creative anymore, so the industry gradually dies out from there being little money circulation. One could say that this doesn’t matter- what good does art, in all forms, bring to the world? Personally I think it provides people an outlet to express themselves as they like, and much of the joy and entertainment you get from living is from art- whether it’s anime (online streaming platforms such as Crunchyroll is subscription based), a book series (Amazon Kindle) or music (Spotify). An obvious advantage is that it’s cheaper for the consumer, but when the cost of this is a loss for the artist, it’s quite outweighed. The creative industry being democratised by technology and redefining of ownership arguably would just make life a lot more boring.
(Source: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnet.com%2Fnews%2Faska-flying-car-could-whisk-you-to-work-in-2025%2F&psig=AOvVaw2XNa5FDtbSCB-X3Ml4jKtn&ust=1612007842664000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CA0QjhxqFwoTCPCQ_a2Lwe4CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAU)
Creative media probably also won’t be the only thing transforming into a service too. Communication and transport industries may undergo a similar process, with the starting point being cars. While taxis and carpools have been common throughout history already, some predict that with the advancements in AI, self-driving cars may become more common. On top of this, once the industries cater and optimise products for recyclability, reparability and reusability, at that point the transport industry would essentially also collapse because transport has been automated. It’s also likely at that point that this would become so common that the price of taxis and similar services will decrease heavily, as most people would use. Similar to music streaming services however, this shift will mainly benefit the companies running these taxi services, as it’s already starting to.
For example, transport company Uber’s revenues have been consistently increasing after each year, with the exception being 2020 (because covid 19 prevented people using transport).
(Source: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/#6)
Compared to the survey detailing driver satisfaction, the mainly neutral reaction with a fair number also answering 1 or 2 could indicate that already, large companies pay their workers less whilst they start earning more. Eventually, this effect would become even more noticeable than it already is, and employment in the entire industry (with more technological developments) would cease. In terms of stakeholders, this is even better for the large companies and consumers, but much worse for workers- similar to how SAAS benefits companies and consumers, but not the producers of media.
(Source: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinterest.com%2Fpin%2F707980003900231266%2F&psig=AOvVaw0RKygTKxHMpAw2G_Yxcn_3&ust=1612009401064000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CA0QjhxqFwoTCNDq0o6Rwe4CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD)
However, this effect is much less obvious for communications as a service. From my point of view, I’d take communications meaning social media and general communication via account to account or phone number to phone number. Most, if not all, social media is free to download, and it’s quite hard to classify communication as a product; even writing and sending letters could be considered a service, as you have a person in between physically handling the letter, although it could be said that this costs significantly more money than private messaging on Twitter (thus it could be implied that the cost of communication services has actually decreased, as opposed to increased like other services). Social media companies’ main source of profit would be the ads they use, at least on the free version of the site/account. For example not only has Twitter’s net profit been increasing, the graph notes that it only earns money through advertising and data licensing (graph: https://www.statista.com/statistics/274566/twitters-annual-revenue-by-channel/#:~:text=This%20statistic%20provides%20data%20on,dollars%20in%20the%20previous%20year.)
By data licensing, Twitter is allowed to use data posted by users and give feedback to to other companies, in order to help predict consumer trends, for example. Because data is protected by intellectual property rights, a license is required to access it, so companies would pay Twitter to help them with consumer feedback. This helps make Twitter money, whilst also benefitting companies. Combined with the virtually free access to communication for normal users which in comparison to traditional long-distance communication is much cheaper and more efficient, we could infer that communications as a services actually benefits all stakeholders (users, communication companies, and other companies).
A conclusion in table format
Industry | Stakeholders | Mainly positive or mainly negative? |
Software | Providing company | +++ |
Users | + | |
Creative | Providing company | ++++ |
Artists | —- | |
Users | ++ | |
Transport | Providing company | +++ |
Workers | — | |
Communications | Providing company | +++ |
Users | +++ | |
Other companies | ++ |
Sources:
Life in 2030: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/how-life-could-change-2030/
Technical aspect of life in 2030: https://www.independent.co.uk/money/why-you-ll-own-nothing-2030-a7582111.html
Adobe and SAAS: https://medium.com/bigfootcapital/7-lessons-from-adobes-successful-transition-to-saas-d0f7250ab352
Adobe and SAAS: https://www.thebalancesmb.com/what-is-the-adobe-creative-cloud-should-you-subscribe-2531651
How companies optimise profit: https://www.wired.com/story/why-you-cant-download-all-the-streaming-media/
What is intellectual property: https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/intel1_e.htm#:~:text=Intellectual%20property%20rights%20are%20the,a%20certain%20period%20of%20time.
Types of intellectual property: https://brewerlong.com/information/business-law/four-types-of-intellectual-property/
Intellectual property rights in software: https://freibrunlaw.com/intellectual-property-rights-software-protect/#:~:text=Contact-,Intellectual%20Property%20Rights%20in%20Software%20%E2%80%93%20What%20They,and%20How%20to%20Protect%20Them&text=The%20term%20refers%20to%20a,of%20the%20overall%20ownership%20pie.
Adobe and security: https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/en/security/pdfs/CCE_security_whitepaper.pdf
Security issues of cloud storage: https://www.imperva.com/blog/top-10-cloud-security-concerns/
Profit per stream on spotify: https://www.timesinternational.net/how-much-can-an-artist-earn-on-spotify/#:~:text=According%20to%20CNBC%2C%20artists%20can,would%20translate%20to%20roughly%20%244.37.
Escrow: https://www.blog.consultants500.com/legal/software-intellectual-property-know-rights-obligations/
DRM: https://digitalguardian.com/blog/what-digital-rights-management
Uber stats: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/#6
31 Jan
Posted by rrc123 as Arts Nd Entertainment, Globalisation, Intellectual Property, IT Systems, ITGS, People and Machines
Before streaming media, people would own DVDs and CDs and this is how you would watch movies or listen to music. You owned your DVDs and you could watch them and lend them to anyone whenever you wished, just as long as you didn’t copy them or do anything illegal with them. But CDs and DVDs are disappearing. Now we listen to music on Spotify or Apple Music and watch movies and shows on Netflix, HBO, or Hulu. Most of these offer subscription plans, you sign up and pay a monthly fee, you then have access to the media on that platform. They also offer different deals depending on your situation. Most people like using these services but others aren’t so comfortable.
Some feel like they have lost control over the media they own or don’t own. On iTunes you could buy a song or album and listen to it through your devices, you can download the music and listen to it anywhere you want. But you don’t actually “own” the song. You used to own your CD, it was yours and that copy of the song was yours, but the song you are listening to on your phone doesn’t belong to you, even though you have paid to listen to it. Before music streaming you could lend your CD to a friend and they could then listen to the song, but you can’t do that anymore, you don’t have the right to distribute that music.
Music is an example of Intellectual Property. You could debate that intellectual property should not be required, that anyone could use any song or extract of a text anytime they wished to without issues rising from this such as the creator of such media claiming that their work had been copyrighted and misused. This would be a lot easier for everyone as we have a lot of media at our availability.
But this wouldn’t work out so well. If anyone could use a songwriter’s song without asking permission and paying a required fee to use it, then this writer wouldn’t compose the song, or there would be no books, articles, or shows. If everything was out in the public domain for anyone to use and creators didn’t gain anything from their work, then these creators would stop creating their media.
Licenses allow users to download and use creative media. If say, a school wanted to put on a play and showcase High School Musical, they would need to ask the Walt Disney Company for a license to be able to use their script. The school will most likely need to pay a fee and follow certain standards set by the Walt Disney Company. If the school didn’t follow these standards or if they found a pirate version of the script online and decided to use it without asking the Walt Disney Company for their permission, then the Walt Disney Company could sue them as this behavior would be considered to be illegal as they are not following copyright laws.
In an article for TradeReady, Ewan Roy claims that protecting Intellectual Property is important but can be hard in some cases. If we don’t protect our ideas then they are out there for anyone to use and we don’t have evidence of it being our own since it hasn’t been protected. But Roy claims that protecting our ideas isn’t always successful. You aren’t always secure from pirates, counterfeiters, and other characters. These people aim to steal your ideas and media and use them for their own personal use or illegally distribute them for others to access illegally.
Roy also gives some shocking facts regarding the misuse of Intellectual Property in the information technology sector. Roy claims that according to the Business Software Alliance, 57% of the world’s PC users admit that they pirate software. These statistics came from computer users in 33 countries, suggesting that this is an act that is carried out worldwide. Although creativity media is protected, this doesn’t stop a high percentage of users from making some sort of illegal use with it.
Many times this illegal activity comes when streaming video media or audio media. Although someone might have a subscription to Netflix, they will not have access to every show or movie that they wish to watch. This user will not want to subscribe to every streaming service because this will mean spending a lot of money and not everyone wants to do that. So instead of signing up to HBO, Hulu, and Prime, they will find some online streaming service in which they can watch that show they’ve been dying to watch. The quality might not be the best, and the screen might be flipped, but it will have to do.
More negatives are coming from this, not just the video quality but also the fact that these services might input some sort of virus into your device, or some inappropriate images might come up. You also don’t know where this media is coming from, who owns it, and usually aren’t aware of the possible consequences of your actions.
Intellectual Property allows creators to come up with new ideas without worrying about them being stolen or illegally used. Without it, these creators would not find the motivation to come up with this media. Intellectual Property protects audio, video, text, medicine, and more. It can also be licensed to allow companies and individuals to use after paying a fee and following certain standards set by the creator. Intellectual Property laws also state that this creative media goes into the public domain where anyone can use it for free and freely 70 years after the death of the creator or when it comes to companies it tends to be between 95 and 120 years from creation or publication date.
Without Intellectual Property, creators would stop creating media as they would get nothing out of it. Without getting a bit of money, (or a lot in some cases), or not even being recognized for it, there would be no motivation for creating this media as it could be passed off as anyone’s ideas. I believe that Intellectual Property is important, it is what helps make all those things we love watching, listening to, or observing. It gives us a creative side to life but also an educational one through articles, medicine, or books.
Here’s the original article by Ewan Roy
Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech | Knight First Amendment Institute
“Some have argued for much greater policing of content online, and companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have talked about hiring thousands to staff up their moderation teams.8 8. April Glaser, Want a Terrible Job? Facebook and Google May Be Hiring,Slate (Jan. 18, 2018), https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/facebook-and-google-are-building-an-army-of-content-moderators-for-2018.html (explaining that major platforms have hired or have announced plans to hire thousands, in some cases more than ten thousand, new content moderators).On the other side of the coin, companies are increasingly investing in more and more sophisticated technology help, such as artificial intelligence, to try to spot contentious content earlier in the process.9 9. Tom Simonite, AI Has Started Cleaning Up Facebook, But Can It Finish?,Wired (Dec. 18, 2018), https://www.wired.com/story/ai-has-started-cleaning-facebook-can-it-finish/.Others have argued that we should change Section 230 of the CDA, which gives platforms a free hand in determining how they moderate (or how they don’t moderate).10 10. Gohmert Press Release, supra note 7 (“Social media companies enjoy special legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, protections not shared by other media. Instead of acting like the neutral platforms they claim to be in order obtain their immunity, these companies have turned Section 230 into a license to potentially defraud and defame with impunity… Since there still appears to be no sincere effort to stop this disconcerting behavior, it is time for social media companies to be liable for any biased and unethical impropriety of their employees as any other media company. If these companies want to continue to act like a biased medium and publish their own agendas to the detriment of others, they need to be held accountable.”); Eric Johnson, Silicon Valley’s Self-Regulating Days “Probably Should Be” Over, Nancy Pelosi Says, Vox (Apr. 11, 2019), https://www.recode.net/podcasts/2019/4/11/18306834/nancy-pelosi-speaker-house-tech-regulation-antitrust-230-immunity-kara-swisher-decode-podcast (statement of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal)) (“230 is a gift to them, and I don’t think they are treating it with the respect that they should. . . . And so I think that that could be a question mark and in jeopardy…. For the privilege of 230, there has to be a bigger sense of responsibility on it, and it is not out of the question that that could be removed.”).Still others have suggested that there should be no moderation allowed at all—at least for platforms of a certain size—such that they are deemed part of the public square.11”
“Google and Facebook are both fighting against legislation currently before the parliament that would force them to enter into negotiations with news media companies for payment for content, with an arbiter to ultimately decide the payment amount if no agreement can be reached.
On Friday, the pair escalated the dispute by threatening to remove the Google search engine from Australia and Facebook to remove news from the Facebook feeds of all Australian users.”
“Italian prosecutors have opened an investigation into the accidental death of a 10-year-old girl who allegedly took part in a “blackout challenge” on the video-sharing network TikTok.
The probe came as Italy announced it had temporarily blocked access to TikTok for users whose age could not be proved definitively.
According to TikTok’s terms and conditions, users must be at least 13 years old.”
‘The release of six decades of fear’: Egypt’s lost revolution | Egypt | The Guardian
“By then, calls over social media for crowds to gather in areas of Cairo, and converge in public spaces had built an unstoppable momentum. “Social media was the most important tool in the revolution,” said Abdelkarim. “People could communicate very easily and express themselves without any censorship.” Mubarak’s police state was over run by dissenters with smartphones and Facebook accounts.”
““It’s really easy to lose track on social media,” Bowman said. “And most people are not on Twitter, but this stuff percolates on to Facebook, WhatsApp chats, everywhere.”
The ambition, Ritchie says, is not “for Toby Young to tweet, actually I was wrong. They’re in an ideological system where they’re not interested in a real debate. It’s for the person who hears someone say something bizarre, and thinks, I don’t know how to reply to that.””
Technology promises hugs at a distance. Beware what you wish for | Psyche Ideas
“Haptic devices aimed at addressing genuine medical need, or for entertainment and novelty, seem appropriate and even fun. However, we believe it’s important to stay vigilant – any technology that changes the norms of our social interactions could have unintended consequences.”
Warning Signal: the messaging app’s new features are causing internal turmoil – The Verge
“Employees worry that, should Signal fail to build policies and enforcement mechanisms to identify and remove bad actors, the fallout could bring more negative attention to encryption technologies from regulators at a time when their existence is threatened around the world.
“The world needs products like Signal — but they also need Signal to be thoughtful,” said Gregg Bernstein, a former user researcher who left the organization this month over his concerns. “It’s not only that Signal doesn’t have these policies in place. But they’ve been resistant to even considering what a policy might look like.””
Twitter is opening up its full tweet archive to academic researchers for free – The Verge
“The change is part of the company’s ongoing efforts to improve the Twitter API”
“But today that universe seeks and surrounds you. When you first join Facebook you make a few choices of your own. But soon the algorithm starts narrowing your options and deciding what further choices to present to you. Because many of us rely on a limited number of news sources that populate our social media feeds, our information universe becomes more and more niche. For Trump supporters, that universe is often paramilitary.”
“Personal information of more than 243 million Brazilians was exposed for more than six months thanks to weakly encoded credentials stored in the source code of the Brazilian Ministry of Health’s website. The data leak exposed both living and deceased Brazilians’ medical records to possible unauthorized access. The incident was the second reported by Brazilian publication Estadão and among several others recently affecting South America’s largest nation’s healthcare system.”
Facebook’s secret settlement on Cambridge Analytica gags UK data watchdog | TechCrunch
“The UK’s information commissioner just told a parliamentary subcommittee on online harms and disinformation that a secret arrangement between her office and Facebook prevents her from publicly answering whether or not Facebook contacted the ICO about completing a much-trumpeted ‘app audit’.”
Amnesty International calls for a ban on facial recognition in New York City – The Verge
“Amnesty argues facial recognition is incompatible with basic privacy rights”
OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei’s next company is literally called Nothing – The Verge
“Nothing’s mission is to remove barriers between people and technology to create a seamless digital future”
Chinese bots had key role in debunked ballot video shared by Eric Trump | China | The Guardian
“A Chinese bot network played a key role in spreading disinformation during and after the US election, including a debunked video of “ballot burning” shared by Eric Trump, a new study reveals.
The misleading video shows a man filming himself on Virginia Beach, allegedly burning votes cast for Donald Trump. The ballots were actually samples. The clip went viral after Trump’s son Eric posted it a day later on his official Twitter page, where it got more than 1.2m views.”
Can robots make good therapists? | 3 Quarks Daily
“From another perspective, the idea that people seem comfortable offloading their troubles not on to a sympathetic human, but a sympathetic-sounding computer program, might present an opportunity. Even before the pandemic, there were not enough mental health professionals to meet demand. In the UK, there are 7.6 psychiatrists per 100,000 people; in some low-income countries, the average is 0.1 per 100,000.”
ExpressVPN’s Research on Phone Location Tracking | ExpressVPN
“In these cases, we call the SDKs “trackers” or “tracker SDKs.” We follow the lead of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, and other digital rights organizations and use the term broadly: “Trackers” encompasses traditional advertisement surveillance, behavioral, and location monitoring. Legitimate uses may include user feedback mechanisms, telemetry, and crash reporters.
App developers have decided to include tracker SDKs in apps for a variety of reasons, and we do not categorize all usage of trackers as malicious or condemn the app authors. Additionally, given the complexity and pace of software development, some developers may not be aware that trackers are in their app or may not know the full implications of bundling such code before publishing.”
“Three-Dimensional Computer Simulations Have Solved The Mystery Of Why Doomed Stars Explode”
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