They run to more than 300 pages, envisaging and exemplifying some of the most borderline and ethically challenging uses of the world’s biggest social network by its 2.8 billion monthly users. Secret Facebook guidelines seen by the Guardian show how the company controls its mainly outsourced moderators’ work down to the smallest detail, defining its rules so precisely that contractors are told which emojis constitute “praise” and which count as “condemnation”.

Source: Decoding emojis and defining ‘support’: Facebook’s rules for content revealed

Z oom being Zoom, Tim Berners-Lee’s name appears in my browser window about 20 seconds before his audio and video feed kick in – and for a brief moment, the prospect of talking online to the inventor of the world wide web seems so full of symbolism and significance that it threatens to take my breath away.

Source: Tim Berners-Lee: ‘We need social networks where bad things happen less’

Source: Wikipedia Is Finally Asking Big Tech to Pay Up

Everything the company does and chooses not to do flows from a single motivation: Zuckerberg’s relentless desire for growth. Quiñonero’s AI expertise supercharged that growth. His team got pigeonholed into targeting AI bias, as I learned in my reporting, because preventing such bias helps the company avoid proposed regulation that might, if passed, hamper that growth. Facebook leadership has also repeatedly weakened or halted many initiatives meant to clean up misinformation on the platform because doing so would undermine that growth.

Source: He got Facebook hooked on AI. Now he can’t fix its misinformation addiction

When Google forced out two well-known artificial intelligence experts, a long-simmering research controversy burst into the open.

Source: Who Is Making Sure the A.I. Machines Aren’t Racist?

Every day, your life leaves a trail of digital breadcrumbs that tech giants use to track you. You send an email, order some food, stream a show. They get back valuable packets of data to build up their understanding of your preferences. That data is fed into machine-learning algorithms to target you with ads and recommendations. Google cashes your data in for over $120 billion a year of ad revenue.

Source: How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you

More than two-thirds of Cisco customers in 2020 were affected by cryptomining, according to new research. Cisco released its “Threat Trends: DNS Security” report Thursday, which analyzed malicious DNS activity and threats that occurred between January and December of last year.

Source: Cisco found cryptomining activity within 69% of customers

Both forms of infrastructure—a state-run electrical grid and the 5G and “internet of things” future to which we are rapidly hurtling—share three attributes. First, their construction reflects a lack of imagination about the danger that can quickly coalesce when seemingly remote threat scenarios become real. Second, compounding a lack of analytic imagination is an absence of preparedness. Third, for both the Texas electrical grid and the emerging internet, public policy protections are either meager or completely absent

Source: The Real Lesson of the Texas Power Debacle