Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras just added two new privacy and security features “amid rising scrutiny on the company,” reports The Hill, including “a second layer of authentication by requiring users to enter a one-time code shared via email or SMS when they try to log in to see the feed from their cameras starting this week… “Until recently the company did…
Tag: frontier
Gopher’s Rise and Fall Shows How Much We Lost When Monopolists Stole the Net
Science-fiction writer, journalist and longtime Slashdot reader, Cory Doctorow, a.k.a. mouthbeef, writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) just published the latest installment in my case histories of “adversarial interoperability” — once the main force that kept tech competitive. Today, I tell the story of Gopher, the web’s immediate predecessor, which burrowed under the mainframe systems’ guardians and created a menu-driven interface…
EFF Files Amicus Brief In Google v. Oracle, Arguing APIs Are Not Copyrightable
Areyoukiddingme writes: EFF has filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Google v. Oracle, arguing that APIs are not copyrightable. From the press release: “The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that functional aspects of Oracle’s Java programming language are not copyrightable, and even if they were, employing them to create new…
Internet Pioneers Fight For Control of .Org Registry By Forming a Nonprofit Alternative
Reuters reports that a group of “prominent internet pioneers” now has a plan to block the $1.1 billion sale of the .org internet domain registry to Ethos Capital. The group has created their own nonprofit cooperative to offer an alternative: “There needs to be a place on the internet that represents the public interest, where educational sites, humanitarian sites, and organizations…
January’s birthstone is the garnet
Happy birthday January babies! Your birthstone is the garnet. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/january-birthstone-garnet…
New Law Finally Bans Bullshit Cable TV Fees
After a longstanding campaign by Consumer Reports, The Television Viewer Protection Act of 2019 passed the House and the Senate last week buried inside a giant appropriations bill that now awaits President Trump’s signature. Techdirt reports: The bill bans ISPs from charging you extra to rent hardware you already own (something ISPs like Frontier have been doing without penalty for a…
Researchers Want To Use Mega Man 2 To Evaluate AI
Games have long served as a training ground for AI algorithms, and not without good reason. From a report: Games — particularly video games — provide challenging environments against which to benchmark autonomous systems. In 2013, a team of researchers introduced the Arcade Learning Environment, a collection of over 55 Atari 2600 games designed to test a broad range of AI…
Brookline Votes To Ban Face Surveillance
The town of Brookline, Massachusetts, became the fifth municipality in the nation to ban its government agencies from using face surveillance. The passage of Article 25 comes as a new study from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) found that many of the world’s top facial recognition algorithms are biased along lines of age, race, and ethnicity. The Electronic…
The Next Frontier in AI: Nothing
How an overlooked feature of deep learning networks can turn into a major breakthrough for AI. From a report: Traditionally, deep learning algorithms such as deep neural networks (DNNs) are trained in a supervised fashion to recognize specific classes of things. In a typical task, a DNN might be trained to visually recognize a certain number of classes, say pictures of…
Will China Export Its Surveillance Technology?
Business Insider ran a disturbing opinion column by their senior finance correspondent: The detention camps where the Chinese government has interned more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs serves a dual purpose. It not only oppresses what the Chinese government considers a troublesome minority on its western frontier but also serves as a lab for the development of surveillance technology by Chinese…