Archive for the 'Technology' Category
We’re All Being Judged By a Secret ‘Trustworthiness’ Score
April 15th, 2019Via: Slashdot: Nearly everything we buy, how we buy, and where we’re buying from is secretly fed into AI-powered verification services that help companies guard against credit-card and other forms of fraud, according to the Wall Street Journal. More than 16,000 signals are analyzed by a service called Sift, which generates a “Sift score” ranging […]
2 million Kiwis Have Police Alert on Their Names
April 15th, 2019Via: New Zealand Herald: Nearly two million people appear in a New Zealand police intelligence system with an alert against their name, inquiries by the Otago Daily Times have revealed. Those in the database are generally flagged without their knowledge, and a leading security analyst says the broad sweep of the system raises privacy concerns. […]
Facebook Put Hidden Messages ‘Big Brother Is Watching’ and ‘The Masons Were Here’ in Tens of Thousands VR Controllers
April 15th, 2019Via: Business Insider: Facebook said it accidentally hid bizarre and “inappropriate” messages inside “tens of thousands” of virtual-reality controllers, including “Big Brother is Watching” and “The Masons Were Here.” Nate Mitchell, the cofounder of Oculus, the Facebook-owned VR company, said on Twitter on Friday that the company inadvertently printed some unusual messages in its Touch […]
Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police
April 13th, 2019Via: New York Times: The warrants, which draw on an enormous Google database employees call Sensorvault, turn the business of tracking cellphone users’ locations into a digital dragnet for law enforcement. In an era of ubiquitous data gathering by tech companies, it is just the latest example of how personal information — where you go, […]
The U.S. Government’s Indictment of Julian Assange Poses Grave Threats to Press Freedom
April 12th, 2019Via: The Intercept: …the indictment seeks to criminalize what journalists are not only permitted but ethically required to do: take steps to help their sources maintain their anonymity. As longtime Assange lawyer Barry Pollack put it: “The factual allegations … boil down to encouraging a source to provide him information and taking efforts to protect […]
A Researcher Needed Three Hours to Identify Me From My DNA
April 12th, 2019Via: Bloomberg: Using just my DNA, a genealogist was able to identify me in three and a half hours. It wasn’t hard. I’d previously sent a DNA sample to the genetic testing company 23andMe Inc. and then uploaded my data anonymously to a genealogy website. Researcher Michelle Trostler was able to access my data from […]
Reaction Engines Testing Successfully Proves Precooler Capability at Supersonic Heat Conditions
April 11th, 2019Via: Reaction Engines: A key element of the revolutionary SABRE™ air-breathing rocket engine successfully passes the first phase of high-temperature testing. Precooler technology will enable a wide variety of high-speed flight and advanced propulsion systems. Reaction Engines’ precooler heat exchanger successfully achieved all test objectives in the first phase of high-temperature testing designed to directly […]
Austria Considering Requiring User Identities for Online Platforms
April 11th, 2019Via: The Local: Austria said Wednesday it was considering a law to make it mandatory for big internet platforms to register their users and deprive those behind hate posts of anonymity. “Unfortunately there have been an increasing number of clear violations, denigrations and humiliations online in the past under the cover of anonymity. That’s why […]
Tesla and Panasonic Freeze Spending on $4.5 Billion Gigafactory
April 11th, 2019Via: Nikkei: Tesla and Panasonic are freezing plans to expand the capacity of their Gigafactory 1, the world’s largest EV battery plant, as concerns mount on Wall Street about weakening demand at Elon Musk’s car company. The partners had planned to raise capacity by 50% by next year, but financial problems have forced a rethink, […]
Amazon Workers Listening to the Inane Ramblings of Alexa Users to Train AI
April 10th, 2019Via: Bloomberg: One worker in Boston said he mined accumulated voice data for specific utterances such as “Taylor Swift” and annotated them to indicate the searcher meant the musical artist. Occasionally the listeners pick up things Echo owners likely would rather stay private: a woman singing badly off key in the shower, say, or a […]
