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Internet Privacy: Additional Federal Authority Could Enhance Consumer Protection and Provide Flexibility GAO-19-52: Published: Jan 15, 2019. Publicly Released: Feb 13, 2019. “In April 2018, Facebook said that up to 87 million users’ personal data may have been improperly disclosed. This was one of many recent Internet privacy incidents. We found that there is no …
Independent Security Evaluators: “Password managers allow the storage and retrieval of sensitive information from an encrypted database. Users rely on them to provide better security guarantees against trivial exfiltration than alternative ways of storing passwords, such as an unsecured flat text file. In this paper we propose security guarantees password managers should offer and examine …
Thompson, Neil and Spanuth, Svenja, The Decline of Computers As a General Purpose Technology: Why Deep Learning and the End of Moore’s Law are Fragmenting Computing (November 20, 2018). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3287769 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3287769 “It is a triumph of technology and of economics that our computer chips are so universal. Countless applications are only …
Google Blog: “Providing useful and trusted information at the scale that the Internet has reached is enormously complex and an important responsibility. Adding to that complexity, over the last several years we’ve seen organized campaigns use online platforms to deliberately spread false or misleading information. We have twenty years of experience in these information challenges …
Via Sapping Attention blog: “I periodically write about Google Books here, so I thought I’d point out something that I’ve noticed recently that should be concerning to anyone accustomed to treating it as the largest collection of books: it appears that when you use a year constraint on book search, the search index has dramatically …
Social Media Explorer: “There’s enough social media monitoring tools on the market to get you absolutely confused. This list is here to help. Every tool on the list does what it claims to do (which is not universal among software and products in general) – it either focuses on social media monitoring exclusively or does …
The New York Times Magazine – The Secret History of Women in Coding – Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong? by Clive Thompson (adapted from “Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World,” available March 26, 2019): “When digital computers finally …
The Guardian UK – “The Society of Authors (SoA) is threatening legal action against the Internet Archive unless it stops what the writers’ body claimed is the unauthorised lending of books unlawfully scanned for its Open Library. Set up in San Francisco 1996 to preserve pages published on the internet, the Internet Archive also collects …
PCWorld: “Some governments, schools, and businesses try to block websites in order to reduce distractions, conserve bandwidth, or censor content. If you want to circumvent such limitations—and you’re willing to assume any attendant risks—you can try to enlist the aid of a VPN, or virtual private network. A VPN creates a secure tunnel between your …
“Algorithms are all around us, using massive stores of data and complex analytics to make decisions with often significant impacts on humans – from choosing the content people see on social media to judging whether a person is a good credit risk or job candidate. Pew Research Center released several reports in 2018 that explored …
Popular Mechanics: “When you’re browsing online, who sets the prices? An algorithm, most likely. A study from 2015 showed that a third of all items on Amazon had prices set by an algorithm, and chances are that percentage has only risen. A new study shows how easy it would be for price-setting algorithms to learn …
Consumer Reports: “Amazon’s agreement to buy the wireless router manufacturer Eero could make it easier for homeowners to manage a wide array of wireless devices, like smart thermostats and video doorbells, according to analysts and Consumer Reports’ in-house experts. But some of them expressed concern over how often high-profile startups get bought by the tech …
