Category: Tech

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Self Driving Roadkill Tech 10 Comments

Over the last two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. Inside university labs, the researchers have been able to secretly activate the artificial intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers, making them dial phone numbers or open websites. In the wrong hands, the technology could be used to unlock doors, wire money or buy stuff online — simply with music playing over the radio.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Genetics Tech 8 Comments

23andtheyownMe.

Now we know why Kim Jung Un stepped over the border for a South Korean handshake today.

His side’s winning.

Like

Tech 22 Comments


CNBC;

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether the use of personal data from 50 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica violated a consent decree the tech company signed with the agency in 2011, Bloomberg reported Monday.
The probe follows a weekend of turmoil for the social media giant. Reports this weekend said the research firm improperly gained access to the data of more than 50 million Facebook users.

Related – What’s genius for Obama is scandal when it comes to Trump

Google Is Evil

Tech 22 Comments

Pulling back the curtain on the mother of all fake news;

At one point during the 2016 presidential election campaign, I watched a bunch of videos of Donald Trump rallies on YouTube. I was writing an article about his appeal to his voter base and wanted to confirm a few quotations.
Soon I noticed something peculiar. YouTube started to recommend and “autoplay” videos for me that featured white supremacist rants, Holocaust denials and other disturbing content.

via Instapundit.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Tech 3 Comments

Tidbits;

[…] tapping Protect takes you to the App Store and displays an app called Onavo Protect — VPN Security. It is indeed a VPN — a virtual private network — that securely tunnels all your traffic through Onavo’s servers. The problem is that, as you might expect from the link source, Onavo is owned by Facebook. If you were to stumble on Onavo Protect in the App Store, you’d have to tap More and read the full description to discover that. If you read all the way to the end, you’d learn that Onavo Protect “directs all of your network communications through Onavo’s servers,” and that, “as part of this process, Onavo collects your mobile data traffic.”

Via Instapundit

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Military Tech 9 Comments
Bumped for update…

By uploading an altered GPS file, it’s possible to de-anonymise the company’s data and show exactly who was exercising inside the walls of some of the world’s most top-secret facilities. Once someone makes a data request for a specific geographic location – a nuclear weapons facility, for example – it’s possible to view the names, running speeds, running routes and heart rates of anyone who shared their fitness data within that area.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

Roadkill Tech 6 Comments

They’ll pry my flip phone from my cold dead hands;

In 2013, Procter & Gamble Co. was concerned about its online ads, including some that Leo Burnett made for Always feminine-care products. The company wanted to make sure people wouldn’t scroll right past them, according to Krister Karjalainen, a former P&G executive who tested some of the ads.
Through a partnership with tech company Sticky, now a unit of Sweden’s Tobii AB, P&G had tracked the eye movements of millions of consumers using their webcams. That allowed P&G to measure how the people, who were paid to participate in the research, were responding to the placement of its logos.

It’s behind the WSJ paywall, but if you hit ESC a few times as it begins to load, you may be able to grab the page. (Update — archived copy here h/t Patrick)

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation