Gifts for people lower down on my list?
Bad Santa: Amazon, Facebook top Mozilla’s naughty list of privacy-crushing gifts
Jonathan Greig reports:
Mozilla has released the latest edition of its *Privacy Not Included shopping guide, aiming to provide holiday buyers with a concrete list of how the most popular items handle privacy issues.
Mozilla researchers spent over 950 hours examining 151 popular connected gifts, identifying 47 that had what they called “problematic privacy practices.” The worst, according to Mozilla, include Facebook Portal, Amazon Echo, NordicTrack Treadmill and other workout tools.
Read more on ZDNet.
Is this concern merely the “latest thing” for activists or do they have evidence to support their claims?
Artists, activists demand concert venues drop Amazon's palm-scanning tech
Concert operators may like Amazon's palm recognition system, but some performers and activists are less than thrilled. A group of 200 artists and 30 rights groups has penned an open letter demanding the Red Rocks amphitheater, its ticketing provider AXS and AEG (AXS' parent company) "immediately cancel" contracts to use Amazon One scanning at any venue. They also want the firms to ban all biometric surveillance at those events.
… The letter contributors are worried Amazon might send palm data to government agencies hoping to track activists and marginalized people, particularly in light of its past collaborations with police. They're also concerned thieves might steal info from the cloud, and see AEG as inconsistent after it condemned the use of facial recognition in 2019.
We've asked AEG and Red Rocks operators for comment. There are no guarantees the letter will convince anyone to drop Amazon One. The tech theoretically helps get people into a venue sooner, and might reassure concertgoers nervous about physical contact while the pandemic lingers. The objectors have some support, though — US senators are also worried Amazon might abuse palm data.
In the Metaverse, we’ll all own virtual property. We need to figure it out now.
https://variety.com/2021/film/news/miramax-tarantino-pulp-fiction-nft-1235113383/
Miramax Sues Quentin Tarantino Over ‘Pulp Fiction’ NFT Auction
Miramax filed a lawsuit on Tuesday accusing Quentin Tarantino of copyright infringement by selling NFTs based on the screenplay for “Pulp Fiction.”
Tarantino announced the sale at a recent crypto-art convention in New York.
“I’m excited to be presenting these exclusive scenes from ‘Pulp Fiction’ to fans,” Tarantino said in a Nov. 2 press release.
The plan is to auction off NFT — non-fungible tokens — based on excerpts from Tarantino’s original handwritten script for the film, accompanied by commentary. The NFT is pitched as “secret,” meaning that its contents will be viewable exclusively by the owner.
But according to the suit, Tarantino did not consult beforehand with Miramax — which still owns the rights to the director’s 1994 classic. Miramax’s attorneys have sent a cease and desist letter seeking to block the sale, but that has not stopped Tarantino and his team from moving forward.
(Related)
https://thenextweb.com/news/metaverse-isnt-a-place-its-a-mandatory-upgrade-for-reality
The metaverse isn’t a place – it’s a mandatory upgrade for reality
Fire. Electricity. The internet. Metaverse
Helping my AI to personhood?
https://www.bespacific.com/the-elephant-who-could-be-a-person/
The Elephant Who Could Be a Person
The Atlantic: The most important animal-rights case of the 21st century revolves around an unlikely subject. “The subject of the most important animal-rights case of the 21st century was born in Thailand during the Vietnam War. Very soon after that, a tousle-haired baby, she became trapped in human history. She was captured, locked in a cage, trucked to the coast, and loaded onto a roaring 747 that soared across the Pacific until it made landfall in the United States. She spent her earliest years in Florida, not far from Disney World, before she was shipped to Texas. In 1977, when she was 5 or 6, more men hauled her onto another truck and shipped her to New York, to a spot about four miles north of Yankee Stadium: the Bronx Zoo. In the wild, barely weaned, she’d have been living with her family—her sisters, her cousins, her aunts, and her mother—touching and nuzzling and rubbing and smelling and calling to each other almost constantly. Instead, after she landed at the zoo and for years after, she gave rides to the schoolchildren of New York and performed tricks, sometimes wearing a blue-and-black polka-dotted dress. Today, in her 50s and retired, she lives alone in a one-acre enclosure in a bleak, bamboo-shrouded Bronx Zoo exhibit called, without irony, “Wild Asia.”…
A “person” is something of a legal fiction. Under U.S. law, a corporation can be a person. So can a ship. “So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air,” Justice William O. Douglas wrote in a dissenting Supreme Court opinion in 1972. Pro-life activists have argued that embryos and fetuses are persons. In 2019, the Yurok tribe in Northern California decreed that the Klamath River is a person. Some forms of artificial intelligence might one day become persons…”
Perspective. When you know your income steam will dry up.
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-11-robots-big-gulf-nations-ai.html
Robots, big data as Gulf nations bet on AI
Robots puttering around Dubai's hi-tech Expo site could be a sign of things to come for the Gulf, where new cities are being built from scratch with artificial intelligence at their core.
The 5G-enabled Expo, covering an area twice the size of Monaco, will remain as a "city of the future" and tech industry hub, Expo's chief told AFP before its grand opening last month.
Perspective.
https://bigthink.com/the-future/ray-kurzweil-singularity/
The Singularity: When will we all become super-humans?
Futurologists point to the exponential rate of technological progress and conclude that we are rapidly approaching a revolutionary turning point. Known as "The Singularity," they predict that we will be able to enhance human intelligence and magnify creativity, entering a new evolutionary stage for mankind and a new epoch for the cosmos. There are at least three objections to this view, demonstrating that the Singularity is hardly a foregone conclusion.
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