Gosh Big Brother, what did you get for Christmas?
https://theintercept.com/2020/12/23/police-phone-surveillance-dragnet-cellhawk/
POWERFUL MOBILE PHONE SURVEILLANCE TOOL OPERATES IN OBSCURITY ACROSS THE COUNTRY
UNTIL NOW, the Bartonville, Texas, company Hawk Analytics and its product CellHawk have largely escaped public scrutiny. CellHawk has been in wide use by law enforcement, helping police departments, the FBI, and private investigators around the United States convert information collected by cellular providers into maps of people’s locations, movements, and relationships. Police records obtained by The Intercept reveal a troublingly powerful surveillance tool operated in obscurity, with scant oversight.
… Police use CellHawk to process datasets they routinely receive from cell carriers like AT&T and Verizon, typically in vast spreadsheets and often without a warrant. This is in sharp contrast to a better known phone surveillance technology, the stingray: a mobile device that spies on cellular devices by impersonating carriers’ towers, tricking phones into connecting, and then intercepting their communications. Unlike the stingray, CellHawk does not require such subterfuge or for police to position a device near people of interest. Instead, it helps them exploit information already collected by private telecommunications providers and other third parties.
… The company has touted features that make CellHawk sound more like a tool for automated, continuous surveillance than for just processing the occasional spreadsheet from a cellular company. CellHawk’s website touts the ability to send email and text alerts “to surveillance teams” when a target moves, or enters or exits a particular “location or Geozone (e.g. your entire county border).”
What would impress you?
https://www.fastcompany.com/90590042/turing-test-obsolete-ai-benchmark-amazon-alexa
The Turing Test is obsolete. It’s time to build a new barometer for AI
This year marks 70 years since Alan Turing published his paper introducing the concept of the Turing Test in response to the question, “Can machines think?” The test’s goal was to determine if a machine can exhibit conversational behavior indistinguishable from a human. Turing predicted that by the year 2000, an average human would have less than a 70% chance of distinguishing an AI from a human in an imitation game where who is responding—a human or an AI—is hidden from the evaluator.
Why haven’t we as an industry been able to achieve that goal, 20 years past that mark? I believe the goal put forth by Turing is not a useful one for AI scientists like myself to work toward. The Turing Test is fraught with limitations, some of which Turing himself debated in his seminal paper. With AI now ubiquitously integrated into our phones, cars, and homes, it’s become increasingly obvious that people care much more that their interactions with machines be useful, seamless and transparent—and that the concept of machines being indistinguishable from a human is out of touch. Therefore, it is time to retire the lore that has served as an inspiration for seven decades, and set a new challenge that inspires researchers and practitioners equally.
Perspective.
Covid-19 Propelled Businesses Into the Future. Ready or Not.
… “Covid has acted like a time machine: it brought 2030 to 2020,” said Loren Padelford, vice president at Shopify Inc. “All those trends, where organizations thought they had more time, got rapidly accelerated.”
… In many ways, digitization is simply the next chapter of a process under way for a century: the dematerialization of the economy. As agriculture gave way to manufacturing and then services, the share of economic value derived from tangible material and muscle shrunk while the share derived from information and brains grew. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan liked to note that economic output has steadily gotten lighter.
… In 1850, he said, “the only way to listen to music was physical presence at a concert or play it yourself.” Then came player piano rolls, vinyl records, CDs and now streaming, innovations that whittled the tangible contribution to music down to almost nothing.
At least a third of the value in a record, cassette or compact disc once went toward tangible capital: the manufacturers and distributors such as retail stores. Today, almost all of the value of a streamed or downloaded song goes toward intangible capital: the artist, the songwriter, the label, the publisher or the platform (such as Apple Inc.’s iTunes or Spotify Technology SA ) that distributes it.
… The shift from physical to virtual commerce went hand-in-hand with the rise of remote and contactless payments and the decline of cash.
… Until the pandemic, many merchants had resisted moving online believing “it took a lot of time, money, and technical capability,” said Shopify’s Mr. Padelford. “In fact, it doesn’t. The average company can be online in a single day,” and pay as little as $29 a month.
Alternate tools. Are we sure this is a good thing?
https://www.ft.com/content/24efc152-a65d-4c48-9032-ee349a2c885b
Search engine start-ups try to take on Google
A new batch of search engine start-ups positioning themselves as potential rivals to Google is hoping that growing regulatory pressure will finally reverse two decades of the search giant’s dominance.
The latest challengers include Neeva, launched by two former Google executives, and You.com, founded by Salesforce.com’s former chief scientist, as well as Mojeek, a UK-based start-up with growing ambitions to build its own index of billions of web pages.
1 comment:
Ambition to increase it, we're already at 3.5bn at the moment :D
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