In the following scientific article on the use of data sets in AI research the authors found that there is an “increasing concentration on fewer and fewer datasets introduced by a few elite institutions”:
Two interesting quotes from Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde concerning file-sharing in an article at TorrentFreak. First, he mentions how file-sharing “paved the way for legal streaming services”:
“File-sharing has definitely helped the rise of services like Spotify and Netflix,” Sunde told M3, noting that this wasn’t what the Pirate Bay team envisioned. Instead, they wanted to move the power back from large companies to individual artists.”
An interesting report on the deployments of biometric and behavioural mass surveillance in EU Member States was recently published. The report was commissioned by the commissioned by the Greens/EFA in the European Parliament.
In an opinion piece at The Financial Times, Izabella Kaminska compares the creation of Meta/Facebook’s metaverse to the creation of Las Vegas during The Great Depression of the 1930:
In the long run, if there is any moral to the Las Vegas story it’s that if you want to bootstrap a fantasy realm for the purpose of enriching a small elite at the expense of users, it helps to have a repressed, desperate and captured demographic within your proximity. With the metaverse it’s unlikely to be any different. You’re still going to be the product. You may be more accepting of it, but only because base reality is getting more and more like historic Boulder City by the day.
Two interesting articles from MIT Technology Review:
An article from Slate.com describes photography technique used by photographer Jay Mark Johnson to “emphasize time over space”:
[H]e uses a slit camera that emphasizes time over space. Whatever remains still is smeared into stripes, while the motion of crashing waves, cars and a Tai Chi master’s hands are registered moment by moment, as they pass his camera by. Like an EKG showing successive heartbeats, the width of an object corresponds not to distance or size, but the rate of movement. Viewing the left side of the picture is not looking leftward in space but backward in time.
In an article at The Atlantic Ian Bogost writes about the differences between the Facebook Papers and older leaked documents:
The Facebook Papers are, in aggregate, a supersensory supply of materials about a social network, produced on its own, internal social network, prima facie assumed to have meaning whose depth exceeds their surface, and mustered as rapidly as possible to generate emotions. They’re a tiny outrage machine, sucking the exhaust from a much bigger one.
Facebook/Meta is shutting down its facial recognition system. They explain their choice in this blog post.
But the many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole. There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use. Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.
The Markup has investigated the shadowy industry of collecting and selling location data. The article details some worrisome examples of very invasive practices.