After Charlottesville, crowdsourced efforts online to identify racists and damage their reputations–or worse–raise complicated questions.
Shortly after last Saturday’s white nationalist march through Charlottesville, outraged internet users took to social media to call out some of the participants in the march.
The voice-control platform wars are getting open sourced.
A voice-controlled virtual assistant–Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or Google Home–is only as good as the data that powers it. Training these programs to understand what you are saying requires a whole lot of real-world examples of human speech.
The two agencies principally responsible for immigration enforcement “have stated that they are not conducting immigration enforcement at relief sites such as shelters or food banks,” the Federal Emergency Management Agency says in a section of its Hurricane Harvey website titled “Rumor Control.” Social media posts had earlier reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents … Continue reading “FEMA tamps down rumors that immigration agents would be patrolling Harvey shelters”
The two agencies principally responsible for immigration enforcement “have stated that they are not conducting immigration enforcement at relief sites such as shelters or food banks,” the Federal Emergency Management Agency says in a section of its Hurricane Harvey website titled “Rumor Control.”
Among those affected by Tropical Storm Harvey’s unprecedented flooding of Houston are likely thousands of survivors of Hurricane Katrina’s 2005 strike on Louisiana, who in some cases are once again seeing their homes destroyed by rising floodwaters. Katrina hit New Orleans 12 years ago today. After the levees failed, inundating the city, as many as 250,000 evacuees … Continue reading “Thousands of Katrina evacuees who moved to Houston are reliving a nightmare”
Among those affected by Tropical Storm Harvey’s unprecedented flooding of Houston are likely thousands of survivors of Hurricane Katrina’s 2005 strike on Louisiana, who in some cases are once again seeing their homes destroyed by rising floodwaters.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement reports that people are pretending to work for the agency and telling people in Texas to evacuate their homes in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, possibly in order to burglarize their homes once they’re empty. The federal agency says it’s not conducting immigration enforcement activity in the affected area while relief … Continue reading “Fake cops are telling Harvey victims to evacuate so they can rob their homes”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement reports that people are pretending to work for the agency and telling people in Texas to evacuate their homes in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, possibly in order to burglarize their homes once they’re empty. The federal agency says it’s not conducting immigration enforcement activity in the affected area while relief efforts are taking place.
As speech recognition becomes more prevalent–and used in settings such as hiring or medical diagnoses–the issue of data and algorithm-driven bias begins to have broader implications. And, as a new experiment conducted by University of Washington linguistics researcher Rachael Tatman shows, the problem is very real. Tatman fed a diverse set of recordings called the International Dialects of English … Continue reading “YouTube video captions are more accurate if you’re white”
As speech recognition becomes more prevalent–and used in settings such as hiring or medical diagnoses–the issue of data and algorithm-driven bias begins to have broader implications. And, as a new experiment conducted by University of Washington linguistics researcher Rachael Tatman shows, the problem is very real.
Microsoft is aiming to make shared ledger transactions safe enough for its stalwart corporate clients.
The networks behind cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Ethereum were built with mistrust in mind. After all, virtual currency users have every reason to believe that others on the network are trying to defraud them–claiming to send money when they haven’t done so, or trying to spend the same money multiple times.
Millions of sensitive records of Time Warner Cable customers and others were left on an unprotected server–the latest case of a now-routine problem.
Millions of records relating to customers of Time Warner Cable and other cable companies were stored on a publicly accessible Amazon Web Services cloud system by service provider BroadSoft, revealing a “massive amount of sensitive information,” according to a report from Kromtech, makers of the MacKeeper security tool.
The Space Weather Prediction Center has upgraded a geomagnetic storm watch for September 6 and 7 to a level only occasionally seen, but scientists say it’s nothing to be too alarmed about. They do recommend looking for an unusual display of the aurora—the northern lights caused by a disturbance of the magnetosphere—in areas of the … Continue reading “A powerful solar storm is headed toward us, bringing hazards and rare light shows”
The Space Weather Prediction Center has upgraded a geomagnetic storm watch for September 6 and 7 to a level only occasionally seen, but scientists say it’s nothing to be too alarmed about.
Three Equifax executives sold almost $1.8 million worth of stock in the company shortly after the company discovered a security breach that could affect about 143 million U.S. consumers and an unspecified number of Canadian and U.K. customers, Bloomberg reports. The trades weren’t part of a scheduled trading plan. The breach was discovered July 29 and believed … Continue reading “Equifax execs dumped almost $1.8 million in stock before revealing giant data breach”
Three Equifax executives sold almost $1.8 million worth of stock in the company shortly after the company discovered a security breach that could affect about 143 million U.S. consumers and an unspecified number of Canadian and U.K. customers, Bloomberg reports. The trades weren’t part of a scheduled trading plan.
Bitcoin transactions could help find links between sexual ads, but advocates caution such investigations might harm voluntary sex workers.
Bitcoin is often described as an anonymous way to pay online, but a group of researchers says that data revealed through the cryptocurrency might help track down sex traffickers.
The attackers, linked to a group dubbed Dragonfly, have accessed systems that could be harnessed to sabotage parts of the electric grid.
More details are emerging about the sophisticated hackers who recently penetrated U.S. energy company systems that could be manipulated to sabotage parts of the electric grid.
The Senate joined the House in passing a six-year renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, over the objections of civil libertarians who say the law makes it too easy to spy on Americans without a warrant, Politico reports. The law is mostly designed to allow warrantless surveillance of people overseas with …
Continue reading “These 2 loopholes in the new spying bill help the U.S. spy on Americans”
The Senate joined the House in passing a six-year renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, over the objections of civil libertarians who say the law makes it too easy to spy on Americans without a warrant, Politico reports.
The privacy-focused company wants to protect users even after they leave the search page.
Over the last few years, search engine DuckDuckGo has built a loyal audience among privacy-conscious internet users.
Philadelphia city officials announced plans Tuesday to encourage the opening of safe drug-injection sites in the city, which has been particularly hit hard by the national opioid epidemic, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. The locations, where people could inject drugs with health experts’ supervision, wouldn’t be directly run by the city, though officials might help private …
Continue reading “How the U.S.’s first safe drug injection sites would work”
Philadelphia city officials announced plans Tuesday to encourage the opening of safe drug-injection sites in the city, which has been particularly hit hard by the national opioid epidemic, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, a pair of long-tailed macaque female monkeys living in China, are 49 and 51 days old respectively, but genetically they are completely identical. Scientists affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported on Wednesday that they had successfully cloned the monkeys in an experiment that merged monkey fetal cells with an egg …
Continue reading “These cloned monkeys are pretty cute. The next steps could get ugly”
Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, a pair of long-tailed macaque female monkeys living in China, are 49 and 51 days old respectively, but genetically they are completely identical.
The fitness tracking app Strava released a heat map last fall showing jogging routes logged by its users around the world. But in recent days, independent military experts have noticed the map discloses the locations of one normally secretive set of fitness buffs: military personnel from the U.S. and other Western nations, deployed at sensitive …
Continue reading “A popular jogging app is leaking military secrets”
The fitness tracking app Strava released a heat map last fall showing jogging routes logged by its users around the world. But in recent days, independent military experts have noticed the map discloses the locations of one normally secretive set of fitness buffs: military personnel from the U.S. and other Western nations, deployed at sensitive locations around the globe.
Despite the attention that’s been paid to apparent Russian interference with the 2016 presidential vote, U.S. elections are still vulnerable to foreign interference, warns a new report from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. The report comes as Twitter on Wednesday more than doubled the number of users it says interacted with Kremlin-tied accounts during …
Continue reading “U.S. elections are still vulnerable to foreign meddling, warn experts”
Despite the attention that’s been paid to apparent Russian interference with the 2016 presidential vote, U.S. elections are still vulnerable to foreign interference, warns a new report from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.
Pyongyang’s hackers, once known for spying and vandalism, have been accused of stealing millions in cryptocurrency in a string of digital heists.
Just a few years ago, hackers working for North Korea were most notorious for ruthless, destructive attacks on the regime’s many enemies around the world.
Online spies outfoxed the notorious Russian hacking group and fed information about their attacks on U.S. federal systems to American authorities.
Since at least 2010, the Russian state-sponsored hacking group Cozy Bear has been implicated in cyber attacks around the world, penetrating networks belonging to the U.S. State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Democratic National Committee, and targeting other systems around the world from Norway to Brazil.