Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

A reminder that the Detroit police department is still running hopelessly flawed facial recognition software against a mugshots built up over generations of racially biased policing.

They keep arresting the wrong people — and the victims are always Black.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/06/technology/facial-recognition-false-arrest.html

Congratulations to #Curiosity, the #MarsRover, who is celebrating an 11th birthday today! 🎂

Still operational after an amazing 4016 days!

Check out more #astronomy #space and #astrophysics at @AstroMigration

"Advances over the past year in the misnamed field of “artificial intelligence” have activated the inverse form of the heuristic that haunts so many disabled humans: most people see the language fluency exhibited by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and erroneously assume that the computer possesses intelligent comprehension — that the program understands both what users say to it, and what it replies."

>>

One of 2023’s most extreme heatwaves is happening in the middle of winter.

"South America is living one of the (most) extreme events the world has ever seen.

Unbelievable temperatures up to 38.9C in the Chilean Andine areas in mid winter. Much more than what Southern Europe just had in mid summer at the same elevation: This event is rewriting all climatic books."

#climate #climatechange #climatecrisis
https://theconversation.com/one-of-2023s-most-extreme-heatwaves-is-happening-in-the-middle-of-winter-211062

"There's been a real desire by everyone to return to a state of normal and so as long as we are heavily tracking and reporting COVID numbers, things are not feeling normal.”

This is unacceptable. Removing the data does not remove the problem.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/tracking-covid-reinfections-waned-people-sick/story?id=101606151

Here, 10.1 defines "Customer Content" as whatever data users provide or generate ("Customer Input") & whatever else Zoom generates from our uses of Zoom. Then 10.4 says what they'll use "Customer Content" for, including "…machine learning, artificial intelligence."
https://explore.zoom.us/en/terms/

🤔

Homeowners Trying to Get Out of “We Buy Ugly Houses” Deals Find Little Relief in State, Federal Laws
==

ProPublica found few jurisdictions have laws or regulations to protect #homeowners from aggressive #RealEstate tactics short of fraud or elder abuse.

#Houses #Homes #HomeVestors #Housing #HousingCrisis #WeBuyUglyHouses #News

https://www.propublica.org/article/state-federal-laws-do-little-protect-homeowners-we-buy-ugly-houses-deals?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

Effective 27 July #Zoom changed their terms of service (T&C) whereby **without opt-out** YOU give them consent to perpetually use your content (video, audio,…) also for #AI #ML “training and tuning of algorithms and models”.
https://stackdiary.com/zoom-terms-now-allow-training-ai-on-user-content-with-no-opt-out/

Check for yourself:
https://explore.zoom.us/en/terms/
Compare with the version archived 25 July by #WaybackMachine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230725013414/https://explore.zoom.us/en/terms/

#generativeAI #deepfake

Today in 1991, 32 years ago: Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his idea for the World Wide Web. WWW makes its first appearance as a publicly available service on the Internet.

#OnThisDay

In recent editorial, Nature stated that "Apart from in articles that are specifically about AI, Nature will not be publishing any content in which photography, videos or illustrations have been created wholly or partly using generative AI, at least for the foreseeable future. "

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01546-4.pdf

This is interesting, because as written this would include e.g. Powerpoint's Designer feature.

Below, an example of the sort of thing it generates. Should this really be banned?

this is a fantastic result but also... quite worrying

"This paper presents a practical implementation of a state-of-the-art deep learning model in order to classify laptop keystrokes, using a smartphone integrated microphone. When trained on keystrokes recorded by a nearby phone, the classifier achieved an accuracy of 95%, the highest accuracy seen without the use of a language model. When trained on keystrokes recorded using the video-conferencing software Zoom, an accuracy of 93% was achieved"

📝 A Practical Deep Learning-Based Acoustic Side Channel Attack on Keyboards
🔗 https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01074
🏷️ #cryptography #security #infosec

I welcome the end state of Amazon’s decade-long slide of enshittification: fake travel guides written by fake people with fake author photos promoted by fake reviews. They have nurtured the worthlessness of their product listings and once-vaunted review system, and are coasting on their once-good reputation. Let’s bring on the full garbage end-state so Amazon can either fix this or finally destroy themselves. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/travel/amazon-guidebooks-artificial-intelligence.html

Wow, #evernote is going all in on enshittification.