Technology

Still smarting from last month's dump of phone numbers belonging to 500 million Facebook users, the social media giant has a new privacy crisis to contend with: a tool that, on a mass scale, links the Facebook accounts associated with email addresses, even when users choose settings to keep them from being public. A video circulating on Tuesday showed a researcher demonstrating a tool named Facebook Email Search v1.0, which he said could link Facebook accounts to as many as 5 million email addresses per day. The researcher—who said he went public after Facebook said it didn't think the weakness he found was "important" enough to be fixed—fed the tool a list of 65,000 email addresses and watched what happened next. "As you can see from th...

Facebook on Monday said it planned to limit posts that contain misinformation and hate speech related to the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with the murder of George Floyd, to keep them from spilling over into real-world harm.As closing arguments began in the trial and Minneapolis braced for a verdict, Facebook said it would identify and remove posts on the social network that urged people to bring arms to the city. It also said it would protect members of Mr. Floyd’s family from harassment and take down content that praised, celebrated or mocked his death.“We know this trial has been painful for many people,” Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president of content policy, wrote in a blog post. “We want to strike the right balance between allowing peo...

Join GamesBeat Summit 2021 this April 28-29. Register for a free or VIP pass today. Call of Duty: Warzone has crossed into new territory with 100 million downloads since its launch in March 2020. The free-to-play game debuted as a battle royale mode for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on March 10, 2020, just as lockdown began in the United States. Like many other games, it became immensely popular as a distraction from the brutal reality of the pandemic. I’ve enjoyed it and can understand why so many have played, even with controversies like lots of cheaters and guns that have be periodically nerfed. It’s one of the games that, along with the 300 million downloads of Call of Duty: Mobile, have helped the Call of Duty franchise grow even more. It’s a compelling game, but it’s not e...

Non-fungible-tokens (NFTs) use blockchain technology to create a unique digital certificate or token which states who owns a virtual or physical item.They have been used to sell digital art, memes, a tweet and digital trading cards, but could they also be used to purchase homes? BBC Click’s Lara Lewington finds out more.See more at Click's website and @BBCClick Source link

The news: NASA has flown an aircraft on another planet for the first time. On Monday, April 19, Ingenuity, a 1.8-kilogram drone helicopter, took off from the surface of Mars, flew up about three meters, then swiveled and hovered for 40 seconds. The historic moment was livestreamed on YouTube, and Ingenuity captured the photo above with one of its two cameras. “We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet,” said MiMi Aung, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, at a press conference. “We, together, flew at Mars, and we, together, now have our Wright brothers moment,” she added, referring to the first powered airplane flight on Earth in 1903. In fact, Ingenuity carries a tribute to that famous flight: a postage-st...

Hackers have compromised more than 120 ad servers over the past year in an ongoing campaign that displays malicious advertisements on tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of devices as they visit sites that, by all outward appearances, are benign. Malvertising is the practice of delivering ads to people as they visit trusted websites. The ads embed JavaScript that surreptitiously exploits software flaws or tries to trick visitors into installing an unsafe app, paying fraudulent computer support fees, or taking other harmful actions. Typically, the scammers behind this Internet scourge pose as buyers and pay ad-delivery networks to display the malicious ads on individual sites. Going for the jugular Infiltrating the ad ecosystem...

This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it weekdays.When the pandemic kept people at home more in 2020, Americans drove far fewer miles than usual. But more people died on the roads.Our roads are dangerous, particularly for pedestrians. I have been curious whether having more technology to enforce traffic laws might help — or whether it would make things worse.I’m reminded of this every time I see reckless driving where I live in New York. (And there is some evidence that this is increasing.) Part of me wants cameras everywhere to blitz drivers with tickets for running red lights or speeding. But I’m also wary of mass surveillance.I talked about this with Sarah Kaufman, associate director of the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Managemen...

Join Transform 2021 this July 12-16. Register for the AI event of the year. Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) hiring Stephen Clark as head of AI last week could be a sign the company is boosting research into ways quantum computing could be used for natural language processing. Quantum computing is still in its infancy but promises such significant results that dozens of companies are pursuing new quantum architectures. Researchers at technology giants such as IBM, Google, and Honeywell are making measured progress on demonstrating quantum supremacy for narrowly defined problems. Quantum computers with 50-100 qubits may be able to perform tasks that surpass the capabilities of today’s classical digital computers, “but noise in quantum gates will limit the size of quantum cir...

Fast-forward to 2019, and the total global product placement industry, across films, TV shows and music videos, was said to be worth $20.6bn (£15bn) that year, according to a report by data analysis firm PQ Media. It is highly lucrative to get a show's leading actor to wear a certain item of clothing, or drink a particular coffee, or drive a specific car. Source link

Deep learning set off the latest AI revolution, transforming computer vision and the field as a whole. Hinton believes deep learning should be almost all that’s needed to fully replicate human intelligence. But despite rapid progress, there are still major challenges. Expose a neural net to an unfamiliar data set or a foreign environment, and it reveals itself to be brittle and inflexible. Self-driving cars and essay-writing language generators impress, but things can go awry. AI visual systems can be easily confused: a coffee mug recognized from the side would be an unknown from above if the system had not been trained on that view; and with the manipulation of a few pixels, a panda can be mistaken for an ostrich, or even a school bus. GLOM addresses two of the most difficult proble...