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Monthly Archives: February 2018

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As UK Police Deploy Facial Recognition, Questions Raised About False Positives
by EditorDavid on 20/01/2020 at 7:34 am
"When British police used facial recognition cameras to monitor crowds arriving for a soccer match in Wales, some fans protested by covering their faces," reports the Associated Press. "In a sign of the technology's divisiveness, even the head of a neighboring police force said he opposed it." The South Wales police deployed vans equipped with the technology outside Cardiff stadium this week as part of a long-running trial in which officers scanned people in real time and detained anyone blacklisted from attending for past misbehavior... The real-time surveillance being tested in Britain is among the more aggressive uses of facial recognition in Western democracies and raises questions about how the technology will enter people's daily lives. Authorities and companies are eager to use it, but activists warn it threatens human rights.... If the system flags up someone passing by, officers stop that person to investigate further, according to the force's website. Rights groups say this kind of monitoring raises worries about privacy, consent, algorithmic accuracy, and questions about about how faces are added to watchlists... The North Wales police commissioner, Arfon Jones, said using facial recognition to take pictures of soccer fans was a "fishing expedition." He also raised concerns about false positives.... "In laboratory conditions it's really effective," said University of Essex professor Pete Fussey. He monitored the London police trials, which also used NEC's system, and found a different outcome on the streets. He co-authored a report last year that said only eight of its 42 matches were correct. The London program has since been suspended. "The police tended to trust the algorithm most of the time, so if they trust the computational decision-making yet that decision-making is wrong, that raises all sorts of questions" about the accountability of the machine, he said. The article reports that 19,000 faces were scanned at a Spice Girls concert in May, and identified 15 people on a watchlist. Six of them were arrested. Nine others had been identified incorrectly. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Opera Accused of Offering Predatory Loans Through Android apps
by EditorDavid on 20/01/2020 at 3:34 am
"It's no secret that Opera isn't doing so well in the era of Chrome dominance," reports Android Police. "According to a report published by Hindenburg Research, the company's losses in browser revenue have apparently led it to create multiple loan apps with short payment windows and interest rates of ~365-876%, which are in violation of new Play Store rules Google enacted last year." The apps are aimed at India, Kenya and Nigeria, reports Engadget: The apps would claim to offer maximum annual percentage rate (APR) of 33 percent or less, but the actual rates were much higher, climbing to 438 percent in the case of OPesa. And while they publicly offered reasonable loan terms of 91 to 365 days, the real length was no more than 29 days (for OKash) and more often 15 days -- well under Google's 60-day minimum. The conditions only got worse for borrowers who missed their payments. Falling short by just a day could raise the APR as high as 876 percent. Also, the apps reportedly scraped phone contacts to harass family, friends and others with calls and texts in hopes this would pressure customers into paying up. These same notices often threatened legal action. Android Police points out that Opera became a public company in mid-2017, shortly after it was purchased by a China-based investor group. But since then, "Opera's market share has continued to fall, due to the increasing dominance of Chrome." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Do Engineering Managers Need To Be 'Technical'?
by EditorDavid on 20/01/2020 at 1:04 am
Will Larson has been an engineering leader at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, and last May published the book An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management. Recently he wrote a thoughtful essay asking, "Do engineering managers need to be technical?" exploring the industry's current thinking and arriving at a surprisingly thoughtful conclusion: Around 2010, with Google ascendant, product managers were finding more and more doors closed to them if they didn't have a computer science degree. If this policy worked for Google, it would work at least as well for your virality-driven, mobile-first social network for cats... [N]ow the vast majority of engineering managers come from software-engineering backgrounds. This is true both at the market-elected collection of technology companies known as FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and at the latest crop of technology IPOs, like Fastly, Lyft, and Slack. While engineering management has not prioritized its own measurement, there is evidence that expert leadership works in some fields... If this is the case, modern technology companies are already well along the right path. This is where the story gets a bit odd. If we know that managers with technical skills outperform others, and we're already hiring managers with backgrounds as software engineers, why are we still worrying whether they're technical? If these folks have proven themselves as practitioners within their fields, what is there left to debate? This is an awkward inconsistency. The most likely explanation is that "being technical" has lost whatever definition it once had... It's uncomfortable to recognize that a distinction I relied upon so heavily for so long no longer means anything to me, but comfort has never been a good reason to get into management. With the term "not technical" unusable, I instead focus on the details. Is there a kind of technology that a given person is not familiar with? Were they uncomfortable, or did they lack confidence when describing a solution? Would I care about them knowing this detail if I didn't personally know it? Given their role in and relation to the project, was the project's success dependent on them knowing these details...? Looking forward to the next 30 years of management trends, only a few things seem certain: Managers should be technical, and the definition of technical will continue to change. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
71-Year-Old William Gibson Explores 'Existing Level of Weirdness' For New Dystopian SciFi Novel
by EditorDavid on 19/01/2020 at 11:42 pm
71-year-old science fiction author William Gibson coined the word "cyberspace" in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. 36 years later he's back with an even more dystopian future in his new novel Agency. But in a surprisingly candid interview in the Daily Beast, Gibson says he prefers watching emerging new technologies first because "To use it is to be changed by it; you're not the same person." "I'm not someone who works from assumptions about where technology might be going. My method of writing is exploratory about that." That's certainly the case with Agency, Gibson's latest, a densely structured, complexly plotted novel that takes place in two separate time frames, which he refers to as "stubs," and has as one of its central characters an AI named Eunice, who is one part uploaded human consciousness and another part specialized military machine intelligence. In one stub it's 2017, a woman is in the White House, and Brexit never happened. But the threat of nuclear war nonetheless hovers over a conflict in the Middle East. In the other stub, it's 22nd century London after "the jackpot," a grim timeline of disasters that has reduced the Earth's population by 80 percent and left Britain to be ruled by "the klept," which Gibson describes as a "hereditary authoritarian government, [with its] roots in organized crime." Given these scenarios, it's no surprise to discover that the 71-year-old Gibson's latest work was heavily influenced by the 2016 election and the ascendancy of Donald Trump to the presidency. "The book I had been imagining had been a kind of a romp," says the U.S.-born Gibson down the phone line from his long-time home in Vancouver, B.C. "But then the election happened, and I thought, 'Uh-oh, my whole sense of the present is 24 hours out of date, and that's enough to make the book I've been working on kind of meaningless.' It took me a long time [to re-think and re-write the book], and I thought the weirdness factor of reality, finding some balance -- what can I do with the existing level of weirdness, and that level kept going up. I wanted to write a book that current events wouldn't have left by the time it got out, and I think Agency works...." "It's an interesting time for science fiction now," says Gibson, "because there are people writing contemporary fiction who are effectively writing science fiction, because the world they live in has become science fiction. Writing a contemporary novel today that doesn't involve concepts that wouldn't have been seen in science fiction 20 years ago is impossible. Unless it's an Amish novel." The Washington Post calls Gibson's new novel "engaging, thought-provoking and delightful," while the senior editor at Medium's tech site One Zero says it's the first time Gibson "has taken direct aim at Silicon Valley, at the industry and culture that has reorganized the world -- with some of his ideas propelling it." "The result is a blend of speculation and satire that any self-respecting denizen of the digital world should spend some time with." And they're also publishing an exclusive excerpt from the novel. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
127 Tesla Owners Complain The Cars Accelerate On Their Own
by EditorDavid on 19/01/2020 at 10:34 pm
An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press: The U.S. government's auto safety agency is looking into allegations that all three of Tesla's electric vehicle models can suddenly accelerate on their own. Brian Sparks of Berkeley, California, petitioned the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration asking for an investigation. An agency document shows 127 owner complaints to the government that include 110 crashes and 52 injuries. The agency said it will look into allegations that cover about 500,000 Tesla vehicles including Model 3, Model S and Model X vehicles from the 2013 through 2019 model years. The agency's investigations office will evaluate the petition and decide if it should open a formal probe... Frank Borris, a former head of safety defect investigations for NHTSA, said the number of complaints cited in the petition is unusual and warrants further investigation. "The sheer number of complaints would certainly catch my eye," said Borris, who now runs an auto safety consulting business. Tesla owners communicate with other owners on Internet forums and social media, and that could influence the number of complaints, he said. He said the timing of the petition is good, because the agency needs to do a "deeper dive" into Tesla safety. Some of the unintended acceleration complaints, which have yet to be verified by NHTSA, allege that the cars' electronics malfunctioned. CNBC points out that Brian Sparks, the man asking for the investigation, "is currently shorting Tesla stock, but has hedged his bets and been long shares of Tesla in the past." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Facebook Won't Put Ads in WhatsApp -- For Now
by EditorDavid on 19/01/2020 at 9:34 pm
Facebook "will no longer push through with its plans to sell ads on WhatsApp," writes Engadget, citing a report in the Wall Street Journal which says WhatsApp still "plans at some point to introduce ads to Status." Newsweek reports: WhatsApp is the only app in Facebook's suite of products free from ads, which make up a vast amount of the parent company's revenue, bringing in the majority of its $17.65 billion during Q3 last year. Like rival apps Snapchat or TikTok, advertising features prominently in Messenger and Instagram. But what does it mean for Facebook? The impact of a delayed WhatsApp ad roll-out will not only mean a financial hit, but may also disrupt how much ad data Facebook can possibly extract from users of the app's desktop and web versions. Currently, Facebook does not charge people for access to its products. Instead, it monetizes personal information by selling details about user preferences to companies for use in targeted ads. And there is clearly money to be made via mobile-based ads, which brought in about 94 percent of Facebook's total ad revenue during the third quarter of last year... "My assessment of this is it will be a delayed introduction of ads," social media consultant and commentator Matt Navarra told Newsweek today... "With the current climate of unrest surrounding data privacy and Facebook's plans to integrate its messaging apps backend, as well as the many legal battles they are facing, I suspect they are being cautious with yet more activity that could ruffle feathers at this time," Navarra told Newsweek. "But it's a case of when they do launch ads in WhatsApp, not if," he predicted. The ad strategy sparked clashes between Facebook executives and WhatsApp founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton, and became a factor in their departures from the firm. Koum and Acton, pro-privacy technologists, reportedly feared the app's encryption could be put at risk. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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