This Bloomberg article deals with an interesting controversy surrounding the introduction of a feature called “App Tracking Transparency,” which aims to give users the option to opt-out of tracking in apps. The article reports on newspaper full-page ads which Facebook published in response. Furthermore, Mozilla has joined the debate by publicly applauding Apple for the feature.
The Guardian published this great piece of investigative journalism on the funding of research on security technologies through EU-funded research programmes (such as Horizon 2020), and the involvement of industry. The following is an excerpt about the way the kinds of funded research projects are presented:
The Markup reviews reviewed different examples of controversial uses of machine learning algorithms in 2020:
Every year there are myriad new examples of algorithms that were either created for a cynical purpose, functioned to reinforce racism, or spectacularly failed to fix the problems they were built to solve. We know about most of them because whistleblowers, journalists, advocates, and academics took the time to dig into a black box of computational decision-making and found some dark materials.
Via the KBS World Sounds of Korea program I discovered the gugak a cappella group from Korea today. From the program web page:
A gugak band named Toris토리스 was formed to bring all these different tori pieces from various regions and make music that can be enjoyed by everyone. Toris is also the only gugak a cappella group in Korea. The group, formed in 2009, is comprised of vocalists specializing in pansori, Korean folk songs, and a cappella. Let’s begin this week’s episode with Toris singing “Saetaryeong새타령” or “Bird Song,” a folk song from the southern region.
Today, after making home-made kimchi, my partner and I decided to listen to this podcast on Sinica about the history of the chile pepper in China. In the episode Kaiser Kuo talks with historian Brian R. Dott about his latest book “The Chili Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography.” A summary from the book’s web page:
Bruce Schneier wrote a great opinion article on aspects of thrust in blockchain technologies and “the idea that blockchains can somehow eliminate the need for trust persists”.
What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure.
Politico reported on some new EU regulations which would restrict the exports of surveillance technologies by companies.
The update to EU rules, expected to be agreed within weeks, would set up a comprehensive EU list of technologies that governments can control through licensing. It would also increase due diligence obligations on companies to check if their goods can be used by their clients to violate human rights.
The Register reported on the announcement of Apple to introduce “privacy ’nutrition labels’” (https://web.archive.org/web/20201109184222/https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/06/apple_privacy_advice/):
“For food, you have nutrition labels; you can see if it’s packed with protein or loaded with sugar, or maybe both, all before you buy it,” he said. “So we thought it would be great to have something similar for apps. We’re going to require each developer to self-report their practices.”
Apparently there has been a challenge that was posed to designers to rethink visual for cybersecurity: “How might we reimagine a more compelling and relatable visual language for cybersecurity?”
Most of the images in this field are indeed overused, so it is quite interesting to alternatives these designers came with. Have a look at the top contributions here.
Artist Deborah Roberts created an interested series called Pluralism in which she collected names in a Microsoft Word document which are then marked as misspelled by the spell checker.
Have a look at the piece here (via Kottke.org).