wired.com
Meta Silently Added Face-Recognition Code for Its Smart Glasses to Millions of Phones Code reviewed by WIRED uncovered an unreleased face-recognition system embedded in Meta’s smart glasses platform. It’s designed to identify people via biometric data stored on users’ phones.
science.org
Will democracy survive the internet? Do we need to choose between Facebook’s surveillance capitalism or democracy? Layered lines of evidence can inform questions like these. When considered together, the evidence gives rise to a concerning picture, as summarized in a recent report for the European Commission that I co-led. The first line of evidence comes from naturalistic quasi-experiments from which we can infer the causal impact of the rollout of internet hardware on relevant outcome measures. For example, the rollout of broadband in the US 20 years ago was affected by state “right-of-way” laws, which govern how easy it is for telecommunications companies to lay cables along public roads and land corridors. Some states imposed far more onerous conditions than others before digging could commence. Using this variation in regulation as an independent variable, one study showed that broadband availability increased affective political polarization.
pdimagearchive.org
Explore our hand-picked collection of 11,082 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.
web.ntsc.rs
reuters.com
Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, said the ruling is a win for privacy. "We spent five years presenting our case because we firmly believe that spyware companies could not hide behind immunity or avoid accountability for their unlawful actions," Cathcart said in a social media post. "Surveillance companies should be on notice that illegal spying will not be tolerated." A WhatsApp spokesperson said they were grateful for the decision. "We’re proud to have stood up against NSO and thankful to the many organizations that were supportive of this case. WhatsApp will never stop working to protect people’s private communication", he said.
nytimes.com
I believe this attempted political infiltration by the A.I. industry will fail. It misreads the public mood entirely. Americans believe the system is rigged by the wealthy and powerful. They’re also deeply concerned about A.I. — a backlash is building, and it will become fiercer when voters learn that a handful of billionaires are altogether spending nine figures, apparently in an effort to try to stop debates about regulation from further developing.
musicbusinessworldwide.com
The company’s central argument is that the artists licensed their music to YouTube when they uploaded it – and that the license covers the conduct they are now suing over.
thatbuild.substack.com
The idea of sparseness was introduced by Horace Barlow in 1972 to describe something similar to population sparseness. But he didn’t make the connection to the nature of the inputs. This had to wait until the work of David Field. His 1987 paper on the basic statistics of natural scenes paper sparked the natural scenes movement in visual neuroscience, and led to our modern understanding of sparseness. In this paper, Field showed that natural scenes were regular in their basic spatial statistics. And he started using the term sparseness. In 1994, Field showed, using numerical simulations, that V1-like representations of natural scenes led to sparse patterns of activation.
ft.com
The reports, published in December and based mainly on freedom of information requests, examined Palantir’s years-long attempts to secure business with Swiss federal authorities.
The lawsuit has had a “Streisand effect”, drawing wider attention to Republik’s reporting and the Swiss government documents detailing repeated official concerns about adopting Palantir’s technology.
It attracted attention beyond Switzerland because it touched on broader European concerns about reliance on US technology providers for sensitive state functions.
anthropic.com
Anthropic’s posture with respect to Fable’s safeguards, as laid out in our launch blog post, is the following:
We have instituted strong safeguards that greatly reduce the likelihood that Fable is misused for tasks related to cybersecurity (among others). In fact, our safeguards are so strong that many users have complained that they are overly broad.
In the weeks leading up to the launch of Fable, Anthropic worked with the US government, the UK AISI, multiple private third-party organizations and internal teams to red-team Fable’s safeguards for thousands of hours in total. These tests showed that Fable’s safeguards are substantially more effective than those of any previously deployed model.
No testers have yet been able to find a universal jailbreak—a jailbreak method that can very broadly bypass the model’s safeguards, unblocking a wide range of cyber capabilities.