Amazon’s
“human error” suggests there is a hack waiting to happen.
Reuters reports:
A user of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant in Germany got access to more than a thousand recordings from another user because of “a human error” by the company.
The customer had asked to listen back to recordings of his own activities made by Alexa but he was also able to access 1,700 audio files from a stranger when Amazon sent him a link, German trade publication c’t reported.
Read more on Reuters.
The
cost of failure? A suit for the Cambridge Analytica nonsense finally
arrives.
Facebook
Has Biggest Plunge Since July as ‘Another Shoe’ Drops
Facebook Inc. tumbled on Wednesday, with shares
extending their decline throughout the session after the social-media
company was sued
by the District of Columbia over a privacy breach.
The news followed a report from the
New York Times that Facebook had allowed more than 150 companies
to access more personal data from users than it had disclosed, the
latest in a series of controversies that have weighed on shares in
2018.
The stock fell as much as 7.3 percent, putting it
on track for its biggest one-day percentage drop since its historic
collapse in late July. Wednesday’s decline extends a sell-off
that has erased nearly 40
percent in value. [GDPR
only wants 4%. It’s these self-inflicted wounds that truly hurt.
Bob]
Would CBO believe that I do not own a cell phone?
I’m guessing we won’t get any useful answers from this.
American
Sues US Government For Allegedly Pressuring Him To Unlock His Phone
at Airport
Haisam Elsharkawi, a 35-year-old US citizen of
Egyptian descent, said
he was stopped at the gate at the Los Angeles International
Airport on February 9, 2017, after passing through TSA and security
checks with no issues. As he was boarding his flight, according
to a lawsuit filed by Elsharkawi in a California court in late
October, CBP agents allegedly pulled him aside and repeatedly asked
him questions, searched his belongings, and asked him to unlock his
cell phones.
When he refused and asked for an attorney, CBP
officers allegedly handcuffed him and took him to a room for more
questioning, where a DHS officer eventually convinced him to unlock
the phone and then looked through it for 15 minutes. At no point did
the agents tell him why they were searching and questioning him, the
lawsuit alleges, nor did they they have a warrant. According to the
lawsuit, the “interrogation” lasted four hours, and Elsharkawi
missed his flight.
For my Computer Architecture students.
AI makers
get political
Earlier this month, Ed Felten — a Princeton
professor and former adviser to President Obama — chided an
international audience of artificial intelligence experts packing a
cavernous Montreal convention center.
What
he's saying: For too long, AI hands have been hiding
in their basements, in effect playing God by deciding which
technology is ultimately released to the masses, Felten said. Stop
assuming that you know what's best for people, he admonished his
listeners, and instead dive into the already-raging public debate of
what happens next with AI.
… "The
group of us deeply concerned about the societal
impacts of AI has grown extensively," said Brent Hecht, chair of
the ACM
Future of Computing Academy, an association of young
computing professionals.
… This
movement is being pushed along by nonprofits,
including the Partnership
on AI and OpenAI.
The Center for a New American Security, a think tank, has convened
back-room conversations between policymakers and researchers.
Perspective. A mere 95 years.
All
Copyrighted Works First Published In the US In 1923 Will Enter Public
Domain On January 1st
… At midnight on New Year’s Eve, all works
first published in the United States in 1923 will enter the public
domain. It has been 21 years since the last mass expiration of
copyright in the U.S. That deluge of works includes not just
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which appeared first in
the New Republic in 1923, but hundreds of thousands of
books, musical compositions, paintings, poems, photographs and films.
After January 1, any record label can issue a dubstep version of the
1923 hit “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” any middle school can produce
Theodore Pratt’s stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian
Gray, and any historian can publish Winston Churchill’s The
World Crisis with her own extensive annotations. Any artist can
create and sell a feminist response to Marcel Duchamp’s seminal
Dadaist piece, The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her
Bachelors, Even) and any filmmaker can remake Cecil B. DeMille’s
original The Ten Commandments and post it on YouTube.
“The public domain has been frozen in time for
20 years, and we’re reaching the 20-year thaw,” says Jennifer
Jenkins, director of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the
Public Domain. The release is unprecedented, and its impact on
culture and creativity could be huge. We have never seen such a mass
entry into the public domain in the digital age. The last one—in
1998, when 1922 slipped its copyright bond—predated
Google. “We have shortchanged a generation,” said
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. “The 20th century
is largely missing from the internet.” For academics fearful of
quoting from copyrighted texts, teachers who may be violating the law
with every photocopy, and modern-day artists in search of
inspiration, the event is a cause for celebration. For those who
dread seeing Frost’s immortal ode to winter used in an ad for snow
tires, “Public Domain Day,” as it is sometimes known, will be
less joyful. Despite that, even fierce advocates for copyright agree
that, after 95 years, it is time to release these works. “There
comes a point when a creative work belongs to history as much as to
its author and her heirs,” said Mary Rasenberger, executive
director of the Authors Guild….”
Something to slip into ye olde tool chest.
This free
online tool uses AI to quickly remove the background from images
If you’ve ever needed to
quickly remove the background of an image you know it can be tedious,
even with access to software like Photoshop. Well, Remove.bg
is a single-purpose website that uses AI to do the hard work for you.
Just upload any image and the site will automatically identify any
people in it, cut around the foreground, and let you download a PNG
of your subject with a transparent background. Easy.
Sometimes the best tool for the job is not the
right tool for the job.
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