The FCC Admits Last Year’s Infamous Hack Never Actually Happened
Last year, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reported that the comments section of its website was hacked. Recently, the agency confirmed what many had already suspected — the hack never actually happened. Smoke and Mirrors Back in May 2017, the idea of the FCC repealing net neutrality was starting to become more of a real […]
A Whistleblower Has Revealed Google Plans to Censor Search in China
Google’s plans to expand its offering in China has historically been difficult between the country’s strict censorship laws and competitors already in the space. It shut down its search engine in 2010 because of China’s “limit [on] free speech on the web.” But recent news from a whistleblower indicates that Google plans to relaunch its […]
DeepMind Founders and Other AI Leaders Pledge to Not Develop Lethal Weapon Systems
A few days ago, London-based developer DeepMind (an Alphabet company) and thousands of other tech leaders in artificial intelligence (AI) signed a pledge vowing to never develop any “lethal autonomous weapon.” The group, which included Elon Musk, Skype founder Jaan Tallinn, and AI researchers Yoshua Bengio, Stuart Russell, and Jürgen Schmidhuber, wrote in their letter that “We […]
Google Fined $5 Billion by the EU over Android Antitrust Violations
The European Commission (EC) recently fined Google a record amount: $5 billion. That record beat the last record high also previously set by Google at a price of $2.8 billion. The EU slammed down the fine because it says the San Francisco-based developer abused Android’s market share in three ways: (1) The company bundles the […]
Academics Investigate the Age-Old Question: Is Your Phone Secretly Spying on You?
It’s a common belief, especially after the National Security Administration’s scandal with Edward Snowden, that the U.S. Government is spying on its citizens. Tech companies don’t do much to help this case, either. For example, many people have claimed that Facebook showed them ads for dog kennels when they have no dogs — but they […]
Has China Taken It Too Far With Surveillance Tech?
Facial recognition has come a long way in the past few years. But there’s still progress to be made in terms of eliminating biases and other flaws. Regardless of this fact, China is already employing the technology to track its own citizens. This police-state type of surveillance has managed to cook up quite a bit […]
Can We Live to 150? This Scientist Said So, but Now He’s Not so Sure
Alex Zhavoronkov is a computer scientist, MedTech developer, and researcher. When he was younger, Zhavoronkov publicly announced that he expected to live to be 150 years old. But as he’s grown older and seen the way politics influence technology growth, he’s not so sure if he will make it to 150 anymore. Zhavoronkov does think we’ll reach […]
Can We Avoid Flaws in Machine Learning?
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues evolving, it goes without saying that it is going to need tweaks and patches along the way. Unfortunately, as several tech titans recently discovered, their AI systems have some serious problems revolving around gender and race. Bias Is Moving Us Backwards Research shows that language-processing AI can show signs of […]
How Can We Prepare for the Coming Era of Automation?
How do we prepare for the upcoming age of automation? It’s a question that’s difficult to answer, and frankly, one that economists Andy Sumner and Lukas Schlogl think we haven’t spent enough time pondering. In a recently published paper from the pair, they discuss the potential effects that artificial intelligence (AI) could have on the global […]
‘Human Third Parties’ May Be Reading Your Gmail Messages
Well, it didn’t take long after Facebook’s data scandal for Google to get some data privacy flack. This privacy issue affects 1.4 billion users, many who use Gmail for daily email activities. Similar to the Facebook scandal, this involves the permissions that the product’s company gave to third-party app developers. The Power in Permissions Google says […]