Monthly archives: October, 2019

Your smartphone takes amazing selfies. Those selfies could tell stalkers where you live.

Washingtonpost.com: “When it comes to sensitive information, the eyes have it. That became apparent last week, when a man allegedly stalked a Japanese pop star after determining her location based on reflections seen in her eyes in social media posts, according to the Associated Press. Those images helped the suspect find her train station. He …

Subjects: Privacy, Social Media

The US military is trying to read minds

MIT Technology Review – A new DARPA research program is developing brain-computer interfaces that could control “swarms of drones, operating at the speed of thought”. What if it succeeds? – “In August, three graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University were crammed together in a small, windowless basement lab, using a jury-rigged 3D printer frame to zap …

Subjects: Defense, Medicine

AI: Algorithms and Justice

Berkman Kein Center – “Government institutions around the globe are beginning to explore decision automation in a variety of contexts, from determining eligibility for services; to evaluating where to deploy health inspectors and law enforcement personnel; to defining boundaries around voting districts. Use cases for technologies that incorporate AI or machine learning will expand as …

Subjects: AI, Civil Liberties, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

Analysis Shows Top 1% Gained $21 Trillion in Wealth Since 1989 While Bottom Half Lost $900 Billion

Commondreams.org: “Adding to the mountain of statistical evidence showing the severity of U.S. inequality, an analysis published Friday found that the top one percent of Americans gained $21 trillion in wealth since 1989 while the bottom 50 percent lost $900 billion. Matt Bruenig, founder of the left-wing think tank People’s Policy Project, broke down the …

Subjects: Economy, Financial System, Poverty

Crawl data analysis of 2 billion links from 90 million domains offer glimpse into today’s web

SearcEngineLand: Data analysis reveals the distribution of PageRank is highly right-skewed meaning the majority of hosts have very low PageRank – “The web is not only essential for people working in digital marketing, but for everyone. We professionals in this field need to understand the big picture of how the web functions for our daily …

Subjects: Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Libraries, Marketing

Internet Archive releases 2,500 more MS-DOS games

Internet Archive Blogs: “Another few thousand DOS Games are playable at the Internet Archive! Since our initial announcement in 2015, we’ve added occasional new games here and there to the collection, but this will be our biggest update yet, ranging from tiny recent independent productions to long-forgotten big-name releases from decades ago.\ To browse the …

Subjects: Internet

Edward Snowden – Without encryption, we will lose all privacy. This is our new battleground.

UK Guardian – Opinion – Edward Snowden – “In every country of the world, the security of computers keeps the lights on, the shelves stocked, the dams closed, and transportation running. For more than half a decade, the vulnerability of our computers and computer networks has been ranked the number one risk in the US …

Subjects: Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Privacy, Social Media

Google introducing auto-delete controls for your Location History and activity data

Google Blog – “Whether you’re looking for the latest news or the quickest driving route, we aim to make our products helpful for everyone. And when you turn on settings like Location History or Web & App Activity, the data can make Google products more useful for you—like recommending a restaurant that you might enjoy, …

Subjects: E-Commerce, E-Records, Internet, Privacy, Search Engines

Google’s new voice recorder app transcribes in real time, even when offline

TechCrunch: “At Google’s hardware event this morning, the company introduced a new voice recorder app for Android devices, which will tap into advances in real-time speech processing, speech recognition and AI to automatically transcribe recordings in real time as the person is speaking. The improvements will allow users to take better advantage of the phone’s …

Subjects: E-Records, Internet, Knowledge Management