Nickelodeon’s short-lived Rise of the Teenage Mutant Turtles may have caught flack when it first debuted, but it soon found itself an audience that’s been very happy to sing the show’s praises for years. Now that the newest iteration of the Turtles have landed their own movie on Netflix, which also holds the complete…
Senate Democrats needed 10 Republican votes following a Parliamentarian ruling. They got only seven.
Twitter has confirmed a vulnerability in its code led to a data exposure late last year. In a blog post published on Friday, the company said a malicious actor took advantage of a zero-day flaw before it became aware of and patched the issue in January 2022. The vulnerability was discovered by a security researcher who contacted Twitter through the company’s bug bounty program.
When Twitter first learned of the flaw, it said it had “no evidence” to suggest it had been exploited. However, an individual told Bleeping Computer last month that they took advantage of the vulnerability to obtain data on more than 5.4 million accounts. Twitter said it could not confirm how many users were affected by the exposure. The vulnerability allowed the bad actor to determine whether an email address or phone number was tied to an existing Twitter account. In turn, they could use that information to determine the identity of an account’s owner.
“We are publishing this update because we aren’t able to confirm every account that was potentially impacted, and are particularly mindful of people with pseudonymous accounts who can be targeted by state or other actors,” Twitter said. “If you operate a pseudonymous Twitter account, we understand the risks an incident like this can introduce and deeply regret that this happened.”
Twitter said it would directly notify every account owner it could confirm was affected by the exposure. For users trying to keep their identity hidden, the company recommends not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to an account. It also suggests adding two-factor authentication.
Sure, you can bring a candle. Or you can wow them with one of these 10 picks.
Apple could significantly expand its smart home product line within the next two years, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. In his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman reports the company has “at least four new smart home devices in its labs.”
Included in that list is the new HomePod model Gurman first wrote about back in June, in addition to a refreshed HomePod mini. The former will reportedly look and sound like the original 2018 model. Apple discontinued the HomePod in 2021 without announcing a direct replacement. The two other devices represent entirely new products for the company.
According to Gurman, one is a kitchen accessory that combines an iPad with a speaker. Meanwhile, the other reportedly brings together the functionality of an Apple TV, camera and HomePod into a living room device. He says Apple could release one of those two products by the end of next year or early 2024 but warns that “not all will see the light of the day.”
A kitchen device would see Apple competing more closely with Amazon and Google. The two are most closely associated with the smart display category thanks to releases like the Nest Hub and Echo Show 15. It would be interesting to see what Apple thinks it can bring to the field since most smart displays don’t feel essential.
Throughout Rick & Morty’s near decade-long existence, the titular duo (both voiced by Justin Roiland) have only gotten into bigger, stranger interdimensional adventures. Each episode made it clear—if it weren’t already glaringly obvious, I mean—how messed up the power Rick has over his grandson actually is. And every…
Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav recently teased the film’s upcoming release, in spite of Miller’s arrests and various allegations against the star.
Who hasn’t dreamed of walking down the side of the road and motorists stopping to ask if you need a lift to the gas station and you explaining the gas can you’re carrying is actually a leather bag? Etsy shop krukrustudio is selling these large leather purses that resemble old military-style gas cans. “Well, it’s about time somebody did it,” I thought to myself when I first saw them.
The bags are available in thirteen different dyed leather colors, so there’s sure to be one to match your outfit, especially if that outfit is an oil-stained mechanic’s jumpsuit. Of course, red is probably the best choice as far as realism goes. But how many gallons does it hold? Will gasoline pour out from its zipper or seep out of the leather?
The bags sell for $180, making it significantly cheaper to carry an actual gas can full of gasoline. Sure, this thing might not have the practical carrying capacity of a leather bag, but what better way to show up at a party with five gallons of warm beer?
Machine learning systems have for years now been besting their human counterparts at everything from Go and Jeopardy! to drug discovery and cancer detection. With all the advances that the field has made, it’s not unheard of for people to be wary of robots replacing them in tomorrow’s workforce. These concerns are misplaced, argues Gerd Gigerenzer argues in his new book How to Stay Smart in a Smart World, if for no other reason than uncertainty itself. AIs are phenomenally capable machines, but only if given sufficient data to act on. Introduce the acutely fickle precariousness of human nature into their algorithms and watch their predictive accuracy plummet — otherwise, we’d never have need to swipe left. In the excerpt below, Gigerenzer discusses the hidden privacy costs of sharing your vehicle’s telematics with the insurance company.
Excerpted from How to Stay Smart in a Smart Worldby Gerd Gigerenzer. Published by MIT Press. Copyright © 2021 by Gerd Gigerenzer. All rights reserved.
If self-driving cars are not going to happen, one alternative appears to betraining humans to use AI as a support system but to stay alert and retain control if it fails — which is called augmented intelligence. It amounts to partial automation, that is, to sophisticated versions of Level 2 or 3. Yet augmented intelligence entails more than just adding useful features to your car and may well lead us into a different future, where AI is used to both support and surveil us. That possible future is driven more by insurance companies and police than by car manufacturers. Its seeds are in telematics.
Young drivers are reckless, overconfident, and an insurance risk, according to the stereotype. Some indeed are, but many are not. Nevertheless, insurers often treat them as one group and charge a high premium. Telematics insurance can change this by offering better rates for safe drivers. The idea is to calculate the premium from a person’s actual driving behavior instead of from that of the average driver. To do so, a black box that connects to the insurer is installed in the car (using a smartphone is possible and cheaper but less reliable). The black box records the driver’s behavior and calculates a safety score. Figure 4.6 shows the scoring system of one of the first telematics insurers. It observes four features and assigns them different weights.
Rapid acceleration or harsh braking is assigned the greatest weight, followed by driving over the speed limit. Each driver starts with a monthly budget of 100 points for each of the four features. An “event” results in points being subtracted, such as 20 points for the first rapid acceleration or for driving over the speed limit. At the end of the month, the remaining points are weighted as shown and summed up to a total safety score. Although telematics is often called black box insurance, the algorithm is not at all a black box like most love algorithms. It is explained in detail on the insurer’s web-site, and everyone can understand and verify the resulting score.
Personalized tariffs are advertised as promoting fairness. They do so by taking individual driving style into account. But they also create new sources of discrimination when driving at night and in cities is punished. Hospital staff, for instance, may have little choice to avoid working at night and in cities. Thus, some of the features are under the driver’s control, but not all. Interestingly, one feature that is under the driver’s control is absent in virtually all personalized tariffs: texting while driving.
And the black box that allows fairness also enables surveillance. Consider a possible future. Why should the black box send a record of speeding only to the insurer? A copy to the police would be extremely handy and save them much effort. It would make all speed traps obsolete. If you speed, the car prints out the ticket on time or, more conveniently, deducts the fine automatically from your online account. Your relationship to your beloved car may change. There is a slippery slope between fairness and total surveillance.
Would you be in favor of a new generation of cars that send traffic violations directly to the police? In a survey I conducted, one-third of the adults said yes, more so among those over sixty and less among those younger than thirty. The technology for this future already exists, as most new cars come with a black box installed. The data it collects do not belong to the car owner and can be used in court against the driver. In Georgia, the police obtained black box data without a warrant after a deadly accident, and the driver was found guilty of reckless driving and speeding.
While the motives for surveillance vary, digital technology supports all of them. One need not even buy telematics insurance. Modern cars have built-in internet connections, and — without it being made transparent inthe owner’s manual — most send their car manufacturer all the data they can collect every couple of minutes, including where the driver currently is, whether harsh braking occurred, how often the position of the driver seat was changed, which gas or battery-charging stations were visited, and how many CDs and DVDs were inserted. Moreover, as soon as you plug in your smartphone, the car may copy your personal information, including contacts’ addresses, emails, text messages, and even photos. Car manufacturers are remarkably silent about this activity, and when asked with whom they share this data, they typically do not reply. That information helps to find out many other things of interest, such as how often drivers visited McDonald’s, how healthily they live, and whom they occasionally visit at night. Connected cars can support justice and improve safety but also spy on you. Telematics insurance embodies the double face of digital technology: surveillance in exchange for convenience.
Once the news hit that She-Hulk would be getting her own show, there was plenty of hope that Daredevil would show up, given both of their day jobs as attorneys at law. Sure enough, the Man Without Fear is going to be hanging out with Tatiana Maslany’s green hero-to-be Jennifer Walters when She-Hulk premieres later…
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
