The “terms and conditions” reckoning is coming, Bloomberg Business reports. New European Union privacy rules go into effect in May. They require among other things much less opaque end user agreements. This combined with the backlash against Facebook for the misuse of data by Cambridge Analytica and some recent, specific actions by companies like Paypal […]
About Jack
Posts by Jack McDonald Burnett:
The Future is Already Here
The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.
How Machines are Picking Out Voices and Faces
“Looking to Listen at the Cocktail Party” is Google’s “deep learning audio-visual model for isolating a single speech signal from a mixture of sounds such as other voices and background noise,” as reported on the Google Research blog. In this work, we are able to computationally produce videos in which speech of specific people is […]
Millions Believe Facebook is Bad For Society
Mark Zuckerberg’s former personal pollster is out with new numbers showing that around 54 million Americans believe Facebook has a negative impact on society. They rank it slightly better than Marlboro cigarettes, but worse than McDonald’s fast food. Recode has the story: “In the U.S. obviously we’re very focused on election interference, and in the […]
Legal personhood for robots in Europe?
Europe divided over robot “personhood,” Politico reports: The battle goes back to a paragraph of text, buried deep in a European Parliament report from early 2017, which suggests that self-learning robots could be granted “electronic personalities.” Such a status could allow robots to be insured individually and be held liable for damages if they go rogue and […]
Zuckerberg Isn’t Up to the Task
We’re concerned about who gets access to our information, yes. But as yesterday’s Senate hearing revealed, we’re also concerned about many other ways Facebook is impacting our lives. We’re worried our children are becoming addicted to it. We’re concerned it’s quantifying and minimizing important relationships, and leaving us less connected. We are horrified by the […]
Too Big Tech?
The Mozilla Foundation released its inaugural Internet Health Report, VentureBeat reports. Among the pressing issues identified with respect to ensuring an open, healthy internet is the dominance of tech giants, both in the west and in China, the report states. Though tech giants in the U.S. and companies like Alibaba and Tencent in China have […]
Also by Jack McDonald Burnett
Conn Garrow, the Girl on the Moon, returns in a new adventure with more advanced tech, more dangerous aliens, and higher stakes than she’s ever faced. An adventure with narrow escapes, impossible rescues, harrowing spacewalks and splashdowns, multimillion dollar deals, marooned astronauts, and even some fistfighting. Girl on Mars is the sequel to Girl on the Moon, which Amazon reviewers […]
The Only Thing that Makes Life Possible
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
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