Sunday, June 30, 2019


This is not what we meant when we said politicians should learn from Russia’s interference.
FAKE BIDEN CAMPAIGN WEBSITE BEING RUN SECRETLY BY TRUMP CAMPAIGN OPERATIVE: REPORT
The New York Times tracked down the owner of a site with the URL JoeBiden.info, a "parody" campaign website featuring out-of-context quotes from the former vice president and leading 2020 Democratic candidate. The site also includes GIFs of him touching women in ways that others alleged made them uncomfortable.




Makes you wonder if they know what to look for.
With a single wiretap, police collected 9.2 million text messages
For four months in 2018, authorities in Texas collected more than 9.2 million messages under a single court-authorized wiretap order, newly released figures show.
Little is known about the case, except that 149 individuals involved in the case were targeted by the wiretap. The wiretap expired last year, allowing the judiciary to disclose the case.
To date, no arrests have been made
Trailing behind it was another narcotics investigation in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania saw police obtain a three-month wiretap that collected 9.1 million text message from 45 individuals. No arrests were made either.




Answers an interesting question, did anyone notice that GDPR thing?
The Privacy Policy Landscape After the GDPR
Every new privacy regulation brings along the question of whether it results in improving the privacy for the users. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one of the most demanding and comprehensive privacy regulations of all time. Hence, a few months after it went into effect, it is natural to study its impact on the landscape of privacy policies online.
We create a diverse corpus of 3,686 English-language privacy policies for which we fetch the pre-GDPR and the post-GDPR versions. Our user study, with 460 participants on Amazon MTurk, does not indicate a significant change in the visual representation of privacy policies from the users’ perspective. We also find that the readability of privacy policies suffers under the GDPR, due to almost a 23% more sentences and words, despite the efforts to reduce the reliance on passive sentences.


(Related)
We Value Your Privacy ... Now Take Some Cookies: Measuring the GDPR's Impact on Web Privacy
Many companies had to adjust their data handling processes, consent forms, and privacy policies to comply with the GDPR’s transparency requirements. We monitored this rare event by analyzing changes on popular websites in all 28 member states of the European Union. For each country, we periodically examined its 500 most popular websites – 6,579 in total – for the presence of and updates to their privacy policy between December 2017 and October 2018.




AI, explain thyself! (Please select one of our ‘pre-written’ explanations.)
Generating User-friendly Explanations for Loan Denials using GANs
State-of-the-art explainable AI systems mostly serve AI engineers and offer little to no value to business decision makers, customers, and other stakeholders. Towards addressing this gap, in this work we consider the scenario of explaining loan denials. We build the first-of-its-kind dataset that is representative of loan-applicant friendly explanations.




Turing asked if a machine could fool a human. Can an Artificial General Intelligence fool another AGI?
Turing Test Revisited: A Framework for an Alternative
This paper aims to question the suitability of the Turing Test, for testing machine intelligence, in the light of advances made in the last 60 years in science, medicine, and philosophy of mind.




Perspective. Because sticking your head out the window isn’t enough.
The Real Cloud Wars: The $6 Billion Battle Over The Future Of Weather Forecasting
… Today conservative estimates of AccuWeather’s annual revenues exceed $100 million. Customers include hundreds of TV and radio stations across the country plus major print outlets like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. More than 1,000 companies use Accuweather’s private weather forecasts to improve their bottom lines. Those range from the obvious—railroads and amusement parks like Six Flags—to the less obvious—say, Clemson University’s campus police department and Starbucks.
For decades, private weather forecasting has been a cozy industry, dominated in the U.S. by AccuWeather, The Weather Company (founded as The Weather Channel in 1982 and bought by IBM for $2.3 billion in 2016) and DTN, which focuses on industrial concerns and was purchased by a Swiss holding company for $900 million in 2017.
But now a perfect storm of macro-trends—ever cheaper processing power, cloud computing, vastly improved AI and a proliferation of low-cost sensors—has opened up the field to a fresh crop of ambitious startups. In aggregate, they have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, who think the incumbents look vulnerable to creative new business models.
They are fighting over a big and growing pie. Recent numbers are hard to come by, but a 2013 article from the Wharton School estimated that overall revenues for climate and weather companies were about $3 billion and that, in aggregate, the industry was worth some $6 billion. A 2017 report from the National Weather Service included a prediction that the sector could quintuple in size.



No comments: