Saturday, January 18, 2020


A private face?
Facebook is ordered to hand over data about thousands of apps that may have violated user privacy
A Massachusetts judge has ordered Facebook to turn over data about thousands of apps that may have mishandled its users’ personal information, rejecting the tech company’s earlier attempts to withhold the key details from state investigators. The decision amounted to a significant victory for Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey who said that Facebook users — and local watchdogs — “have a right to know” whether their privacy has been violated.




Another privacy concern to add to future privacy acts?
AP reports:
Florida lawmakers advanced a proposal Thursday that would bar life insurers from using information from commercially available genetic tests to deny policies or set premiums based on markers that might be discovered through DNA home kits.
The effort comes amid the booming popularity of heavily marketed genetic testing and the rising concerns from privacy groups and lawmakers.
Read more on Shelton Herald.


(Related)
LEAK: Commission considers facial recognition ban in AI ‘white paper’
The European Commission is considering measures to impose a temporary ban on facial recognition technologies used by both public and private actors, according to a draft white paper on Artificial Intelligence obtained by EURACTIV.




Interesting question.
Why Twitter May Be Ruinous for the Left
It’s a machine for misunderstanding other people’s ideas and identities. How do you even organize that?




Architecture.
Want optimized AI? Rethink your storage infrastructure and data pipeline
Most discussions of AI infrastructure start and end with compute hardware — the GPUs, general-purpose CPUs, FPGAs, and tensor processing units responsible for training complex algorithms and making predictions based on those models. But AI also demands a lot from your storage. Keeping a potent compute engine well-utilized requires feeding it with vast amounts of information as fast as possible. Anything less and you clog the works and create bottlenecks.
Optimizing an AI solution for capacity and cost, while scaling for growth, means taking a fresh look at its data pipeline. Are you ready to ingest petabytes worth of legacy, IoT, and sensor data? Do your servers have the read/write bandwidth for data preparation? Are they ready for the randomized access patterns involved in training?
Answering those questions now will help determine your organization’s AI-readiness.




Yeah… No!
Life will soon be like ‘Her’ — and we’ll fall in love with AI
… Dr. Maciej Musial from the University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznan, Poland has pointed out that people will soon fall into the arms of humanoid robots and artificial intelligence apps on our smartphones. The evidence of this can be found in the fact that people are already seen growing attached to their gadgets such as smartphones. The research further suggested that a new phenomenon becoming frequent is the underlying formation of emotional relationships between humans and artificial intelligence under different disguises.
… David Hanson, who created the famous lifelike Sophia Robot recently revealed that humans are only a few decades away from marrying droids. There is already the kind of robot in the world today that overcome the bridge of intimacy, which is required for a deep emotional partnership. The researcher suggests that humanoids will get the same rights as humans by the year 2045. This would include the right to own land, vote in general elections, and even marry.
Hanson also suggests that by the year 2035, robots will be able to accomplish almost everything that humans do. They might even start their own ‘Global Robotic Civil Rights Moments’ by 2038 and compel leaders to provide them with equal status in the human world.




AI for the defense? Why “cute?”
This Company Made a 'Cute' AI Lawyer to Deploy 'Information Warfare' for Divorced Men
A man who feels wronged by his ex-wife thinks he can help ex-husbands everywhere with an artificially intelligent legal assistant that collects public court records to help clients file lawsuits and predicts what the opposing legal team will do next.
He also gave this piece of software a female avatar, a woman in a pencil skirt and heels he named Justine Falcon.




For the toolkit.
Microsoft Introduces Free Source Code Analyzer
Called Microsoft Application Inspector, the new tool doesn’t focus on discovering poor programming practices in the analyzed code. Instead, it looks for interesting features and metadata, such as cryptography, connections to remote resources, and the underlying platform.
Application Inspector was released in open source and is available for download from Microsoft’s GitHub repository.



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