/story

Facebook dévoile les premiers noms de son conseil indépendant de #surveillance
▻https://www.01net.com/actualites/facebook-devoile-les-premiers-noms-de-son-conseil-independant-de-surveillance

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#Facebook and the Folly of Self-Regulation | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-and-the-folly-of-self-regulation

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This board is also stacked with a disproportionate number of Americans who tend to view these issues through American legal history and conflicts. The original 20 includes five Americans, none of whom have any deep knowledge of how social media operate around the world.

In contrast, the board has only one member from India—the country with more Facebook users than any other. India is home to more than 22 major languages and 700 dialects. The majority-Hindu nation has more Muslim citizens than any other country except Indonesia, along with millions of Buddhists, Christians, Jews, and Bahai. Facebook and #WhatsApp have been deployed by violent Hindu nationalists (aligned closely with the ruling BJP Party of Prime Minister Narendara Modi, the most popular politician on Facebook) to terrorize Muslims, Christians, journalists, scholars, and anyone who criticizes the central government’s efforts to make India a brutal, nationalistic theocracy.

[...]

Ultimately, this board will influence none of the things that make Facebook Facebook: global scale (2.5 billion users in more than 100 languages), targeted ads (enabled by surveillance), and algorithmic amplification of some content rather than other content. The problem with Facebook is not that a photograph came down that one time. The problem with Facebook is Facebook.

Stewart Brand Is 81—and He Doesn’t Want to Go on a Ventilator | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/stewart-brand-ventilator-end-of-life-care

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Un article émouvant sur l’intubation et le choix d’une personne vivante envers ce traitement. Par Steven Levy (l’historien des Hackers) à propos de Stewart Brand.

Brand is a legendary writer and thinker, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and cofounder of the Long Now Foundation. He is also 81, and his tweet was a way of opening a conversation on a subject that was impossible for him to avoid during the Covid-19 pandemic: When is it time to say no to treatment?

This end-of-life question didn’t arrive with the new coronavirus. For people who are older or have serious medical conditions, the possibility of having to make frightening health decisions in an emergency always lurks in the back of the mind. Covid-19 drives those dark thoughts to the foreground. While the virus is still a mystery in many ways, experts have been consistent on at least one point: It hits older people and those with preexisting medical conditions the hardest. And one of the worst complications—acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS)—can come on suddenly, rapidly accelerating to the point where treatment dictates admission to an intensive care unit.

Brand now was posing a question: Should you just not go there? That’s when he opened it up to Twitter. “The main thing I’m looking for is data,” he wrote. “Anecdotes. Statistics. Video. INFORMATION … The stuff that good decisions are made of.”

#Intubation #COVID-19 #Stewart_Brand #Steven_Levy

How to Set Your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to Control Who Sees What | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/lock-down-social-media-privacy-security-facebook-twitter

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12 règles pour protéger au mieux sa vie privée sur les médias sociaux (mais pas « des » médias sociaux).

Social media can bring us together, and even distract us sometimes from our troubles—but it also can expose us to scammers, hackers, and...less than pleasant experiences.

Don’t panic though: you can keep the balance towards the positive with just a few common-sense steps, and we have some of the most vital ones below. When it comes to staying safe on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, a lot of it is common sense, with a sprinkling of extra awareness.

#Médias_sociaux #Vie_privée

Inside the Early Days of China’s Coronavirus Coverup | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-early-days-of-chinas-coronavirus-coverup

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Seasoned journalists in China often say “Cover China as if you were covering Snapchat”—in other words, screenshot everything, under the assumption that any given story could be deleted soon. For the past two and half months, I’ve been trying to screenshot every news article, social media post, and blog post that seems relevant to the coronavirus. In total, I’ve collected nearly 100 censored online posts: 40 published by major news organizations, and close to 60 by ordinary social media users like Yue. In total, the number of Weibo posts censored and WeChat accounts suspended would be virtually uncountable. (Despite numerous attempts, Weibo and WeChat could not be reached for comment.)

Taken together, these deleted posts offer a submerged account of the early days of a global pandemic, and they indicate the contours of what Beijing didn’t want Chinese people to hear or see. Two main kinds of content were targeted for deletion by censors: Journalistic investigations of how the epidemic first started and was kept under wraps in late 2019 and live accounts of the mayhem and suffering inside Wuhan in the early days of the city’s lockdown, as its medical system buckled under the world’s first hammerstrike of patients.

It’s not hard to see how these censored posts contradicted the state’s preferred narrative. Judging from these vanished accounts, the regime’s coverup of the initial outbreak certainly did not help buy the world time, but instead apparently incubated what some have described as a humanitarian disaster in Wuhan and Hubei Province, which in turn may have set the stage for the global spread of the virus. And the state’s apparent reluctance to show scenes of mass suffering and disorder cruelly starved Chinese citizens of vital information when it mattered most.

On January 20, 2020, Zhong Nanshan, a prominent Chinese infectious disease expert, essentially raised the curtain on China’s official response to the coronavirus outbreak when he confirmed on state television that the pathogen could be transmitted from human to human. Zhong was, in many ways, an ideal spokesperson for the government’s effort; he had become famous for being a medical truth-teller during the 2003 SARS outbreak.

Immediately following Zhong’s announcement, the Chinese government allowed major news organizations into Wuhan, giving them a surprising amount of leeway to report on the situation there. In another press conference on January 21, Zhong praised the government’s transparency. Two days after that, the government shut down virtually all transportation into and out of Wuhan, later extending the lockdown to other cities.

The sequence of events had all the appearances of a strategic rollout: Zhong’s January 20 TV appearance marked the symbolic beginning of the crisis, to which the government responded swiftly, decisively, and openly.

But shortly after opening the information floodgates, the state abruptly closed them again—particularly as news articles began to indicate a far messier account of the government’s response to the disease. “The last couple of weeks were the most open Weibo has ever been and [offered] the most freedom many media organizations have ever enjoyed,” one Chinese Weibo user wrote on February 2. “But it looks like this has come to an end.”

On February 5, a Chinese magazine called China Newsweek published an interview with a doctor in Wuhan, who said that physicians were told by hospital heads not to share any information at the beginning of the outbreak. At the time, he said, the only thing that doctors could do was to urge patients to wear masks.

Various frontline reports that were later censored supported this doctor’s descriptions: “Doctors were not allowed to wear isolation gowns because that might stoke fears,” said a doctor interviewed by the weekly publication Freezing Point. The interview was later deleted.

By January, according to Caixin, a gene sequencing laboratory in Guangzhou had discovered that the novel virus in Wuhan shared a high degree of similarity with the virus that caused the SARS outbreak in 2003; but, according to an anonymous source, Hubei’s health commission promptly demanded that the lab suspend all testing and destroy all samples. On January 6, according to the deleted Caixin article, China’s National Center for Disease Control and Prevention initiated an “internal second-degree emergency response”—but did not alert the public. Caixin’s investigation disappeared from the Chinese internet only hours after it was published.

Among journalists and social critics in China, the 404 error code, which announces that the content on a webpage is no longer available, has become a badge of honor. “At this point, if you haven’t had a 404 under your belt, can you even call yourself a journalist?” a Chinese reporter, who requested anonymity, jokingly asked me.

However, the crackdown on reports out of Wuhan was even more aggressive against ordinary users of social media.

On January 24, a resident posted that nurses at a Hubei province hospital were running low on masks and protective goggles. Soon after that post was removed, another internet user reposted it and commented: “Sina employees—I’m begging you to stop deleting accounts. Weibo is an effective way to offer help. Only when we are aware of what frontline people need can we help them.”

Only minutes later, the post was taken down. The user’s account has since vanished.

But the real war between China’s censors and its social media users began on February 7.

That day, a Wuhan doctor named Li Wenliang—a whistleblower who had raised alarms about the virus in late December, only to be reprimanded for “spreading rumors”—died of Covid-19.

Within hours, his death sparked a spectacular outpouring of collective grief on Chinese social media—an outpouring that was promptly snuffed out, post by post, minute by minute. With that, grief turned to wrath, and posts demanding freedom of speech erupted across China’s social media platforms as the night went on.

A number of posts directly challenged the party’s handling of Li’s whistleblowing and the government’s relentless suppression of the freedom of speech in China. Some Chinese social media users started to post references to the 2019 Hong Kong protests, uploading clips of “Do You Hear People Sing” from Les Miserables, which became a protest anthem during last year’s mass demonstrations. Even more daringly, some posted photos from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest and massacre, one of the most taboo subjects in China.

One image that surfaced from Tiananmen was an image of a banner from the 1989 protest that reads: “We shall not let those murderers stand tall so they will block our wind of freedom from blowing.”

The censors frantically kept pace. In the span of a quarter hour from 23:16 to around 23:30, over 20 million searches for information on the death of Li Wenliang were winnowed down to fewer than 2 million, according to a Hong Kong-based outlet The Initium. The #DrLiWenLiangDied topic was dragged from number 3 on the trending topics list to number 7 within roughly the same time period.

Since the night of February 7, whole publications have fallen to the scythe. On January 27, an opinion blog called Dajia published an article titled “50 Days into the Outbreak, The Entire Nation is Bearing the Consequence of the Death of the Media.” By February 19, the entire site was shut down, never to resurface.

On March 10, an article about another medical whistleblower in Wuhan—another potential Li—was published and then swiftly wiped off the internet, which began yet another vast cat-and-mouse game between censors and Chinese social media users. The story, published by People, profiled a doctor, who, as she put it, had “handed out the whistle” by alerting other physicians about the emergence of a SARS-like virus in late December. The article reported that she had been scolded by hospital management for not keeping the information a secret.

Soon after it was deleted, Chinese social media users started to recreate the article in every way imaginable: They translated it into over 10 languages; transcribed the piece in Morse code; wrote it out in ancient Chinese script; incorporated its content into a scannable QR code; and even rewrote it in Klingon—all in an effort to evade the censorship machine. All of these efforts were eradicated from the internet.

But it’s unlikely that the masses of people who watched posts being expunged from the internet will forget how they were governed in the pandemic. On March 17, I picked up my phone, opened my Weibo account, and typed out the following sentence: “You are waiting for their apology, and they are waiting for your appreciation.” The post promptly earned me a 404 badge.

Shawn Yuan is a Beijing-based freelance journalist and photographer. He travels between the Middle East and China to report on human rights and politics issues.

#Chine #Censure #Médias_sociaux #Journalisme

How Well Can Algorithms Recognize Your Masked Face? | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/algorithms-recognize-masked-face

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Facial-recognition algorithms from Los Angeles startup TrueFace are good enough that the US Air Force uses them to speed security checks at base entrances. But CEO Shaun Moore says he’s facing a new question: How good is TrueFace’s technology when people are wearing face masks?

“It’s something we don’t know yet because it’s not been deployed in that environment,” Moore says. His engineers are testing their technology on masked faces and are hurriedly gathering images of masked faces to tune their machine-learning algorithms for pandemic times.

Some vendors and users of facial recognition say the technology works well enough on masked faces. “We can identify a person wearing a balaclava, or a medical mask and a hat covering the forehead,” says Artem Kuharenko, founder of NtechLab, a Russian company whose technology is deployed on 150,000 cameras in Moscow. He says that the company has experience with face masks through contracts in southeast Asia, where masks are worn to curb colds and flu. US Customs and Border Protection, which uses facial recognition on travelers boarding international flights at US airports, says its technology can identify masked faces.

But Anil Jain, a professor at Michigan State University who works on facial recognition and biometrics, says such claims can’t be easily verified. “Companies can quote internal numbers, but we don’t have a trusted database or evaluation to check that yet,” says. “There’s no third-party validation.”

Early in March, China’s SenseTime, which became the world’s most valuable AI startup in part through providing face recognition to companies and government agencies, said it had upgraded its product for controlling access to buildings and workplaces to work with face masks. The software attends to facial features left uncovered, such as eyes, eyebrows, and the bridge of the nose, a spokesperson said. The US restricted sales to SenseTime and other Chinese AI companies last year for allegedly supplying technology used to oppress Uighur Muslims in China’s northwest.

Reports from China of the systems’ effectiveness with masks are mixed. One Beijing resident told WIRED she appreciated the convenience of not having to remove her mask to use Alipay, China’s leading mobile payments network, which has updated its facial-recognition system. But Daniel Sun, a Gartner analyst also in Beijing, says he has had to step out of crowds to pull down his mask to use facial recognition for payments. Still, he believes facial recognition will continue to grow in usage, perhaps helped by interest in more hygienic, touch-free transactions. “I don’t think Covid-19 will stop the increase in usage of this technology in China,” Sun says.

#Reconnaissance_faciale

Stop Getting So Excited About ‘Preliminary’ Findings | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/stop-getting-so-excited-about-preliminary-findings

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The hazards of this corner-cutting aren’t limited to potential treatments for Covid-19. Diagnostic tools are also being rushed through the normal scientific process. The Food and Drug Administration has instituted special guidelines that allow Covid-19 antibody tests to be sold without the regular validation and approvals. This has led to problems all over the country, as buyers of the tests discover that they don’t perform as promised, and produce results that might not be reliable enough to form a basis for clinical or public health decisions. Even an antibody test that’s been found to be 97 percent accurate (and many of the tests available right now fall short of this) will be a disastrous failure if it’s given out to a population with a 3 percent prevalence of the disease. Under those conditions, more than half of the positive results will be mistaken. “We sacrificed quality for speed, and in the end, when it’s people’s lives that are hanging in the balance, safety has to take precedence over speed,” University of Minnesota infectious disease researcher Michael T. Osterholm told The New York Times earlier this week.

Étonnant : An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Coronavirus | WIRED, 01.25.2020
▻https://www.wired.com/story/ai-epidemiologist-wuhan-public-health-warnings

ON JANUARY 9, the World Health Organization notified the public of a flu-like outbreak in China: a cluster of pneumonia cases had been reported in Wuhan, possibly from vendors’ exposure to live animals at the Huanan Seafood Market. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had gotten the word out a few days earlier, on January 6. But a Canadian health monitoring platform had beaten them both to the punch, sending word of the outbreak to its customers on December 31.

BlueDot uses an AI-driven algorithm that scours foreign-language news reports, animal and plant disease networks, and official proclamations to give its clients advance warning to avoid danger zones like Wuhan.

Speed matters during an outbreak, and tight-lipped Chinese officials do not have a good track record of sharing information about diseases, air pollution, or natural disasters. But public health officials at WHO and the CDC have to rely on these very same health officials for their own disease monitoring. So maybe an AI can get there faster. “We know that governments may not be relied upon to provide information in a timely fashion,” says Kamran Khan, BlueDot’s founder and CEO. “We can pick up news of possible outbreaks, little murmurs or forums or blogs of indications of some kind of unusual events going on.”

Would the Coronavirus Quarantine of Wuhan Even Work?

Khan says the algorithm doesn’t use social media postings because that data is too messy. But he does have one trick up his sleeve: access to global airline ticketing data that can help predict where and when infected residents are headed next. It correctly predicted that the virus would jump from Wuhan to Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo in the days following its initial appearance.

Khan, who was working as a hospital infectious disease specialist in Toronto during the SARS epidemic of 2003, dreamt of finding a better way to track diseases. That virus started in provincial China and spread to Hong Kong and then to Toronto, where it killed 44 people. “There’s a bit of deja vu right now,” Khan says about the coronavirus outbreak today. “In 2003, I watched the virus overwhelm the city and cripple the hospital. There was an enormous amount of mental and physical fatigue, and I thought, ‘Let’s not do this again.’”

After testing out several predictive programs, Khan launched BlueDot in 2014 and raised $9.4 million in venture capital funding. The company now has 40 employees—physicians and programmers who devise the disease surveillance analytic program, which uses natural-language processing and machine learning techniques to sift through news reports in 65 languages, along with airline data and reports of animal disease outbreaks. “What we have done is use natural language processing and machine learning to train this engine to recognize whether this is an outbreak of anthrax in Mongolia versus a reunion of the heavy metal band Anthrax,” Kahn says.

Once the automated data-sifting is complete, human analysis takes over, Khan says. Epidemiologists check that the conclusions make sense from a scientific standpoint, and then a report is sent to government, business, and public health clients.

BlueDot’s reports are then sent to public health officials in a dozen countries (including the US and Canada), airlines, and frontline hospitals where infected patients might end up. BlueDot doesn’t sell their data to the general public, but they are working on it, Khan says.

The firm isn’t the first to look for an end-run around public health officials, but they are hoping to do better than Google Flu Trends, which was euthanized after underestimating the severity of the 2013 flu season by 140 percent. BlueDot successfully predicted the location of the Zika outbreak in South Florida in a publication in the British medical journal The Lancet.

Whether BlueDot proves as successful this time remains to be seen. But in the meantime, some public health experts say that despite covering up the SARS outbreak for months in 2002, Chinese officials have reacted faster this time.

“The outbreak is probably a lot bigger than one the public health officials have confirmation of,” says James Lawler, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, who treated quarantined Ebola patients in 2017 and 2018. “Just using a back-of-the-envelope calculation on how many travelers there are from China in a given week, and percentage than might have been affected, it’s a lot.”

An area containing eight cities and 35 million people have now been quarantined in China, The New York Times reported Friday, while The Wall Street Journal reports that hospitals in the epicenter of Wuhan are turning away patients and medical supplies such as masks and sanitizers have run out.

Lawler and others say that the coronavirus outbreak will continue to spread as travelers from China to other nations exhibit symptoms of infection. He says we still don’t know how many people will get sick, and how many of those will die before the outbreak recedes.

To stop the spread of disease, public health officials will need to tell the truth and tell it quickly. But in the meantime, it might be worth deputizing an AI-driven epidemiologist.

#IA #crise_sanitaire #épidémiologie #transports_aériens(sans #tracking)

Apple and Google Respond to Covid-19 Contact Tracing Concerns | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/apple-google-contact-tracing-strengths-weaknesses

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The result is a complicated picture—an unproven system whose imperfections could drive users away from adopting it, or even result in unintended privacy violations. And yet it may also preserve privacy in the most important ways, while also serving as a significant tool to help countries around the world prevent new outbreaks.

The criticisms of the Bluetooth-based system outlined below don’t encompass some of the larger sociological and political issues surrounding smartphone contact tracing. Any effective contact tracing will require testing for Covid-19 to ramp up far past current levels. Diagnosed or exposed individuals need the economic freedom and space to self-quarantine. And many low-income or older folks—those who appear to be most at risk—are less likely to have smartphones. Instead, we’ll examine the more immediate question of potential technical vulnerabilities in the system.
Can It Be Used to Track People?

The likeliest concern for anyone taking part in a contact-tracing system is whether they’re signing up for more surveillance. Bluetooth-based contact tracing is perhaps the least surveillance-friendly option, but its protections aren’t perfect.

To demonstrate the problem, Soltani imagines a nosy neighbor setting up a camera outside their window and recording the face of everyone who walks by. The same neighbor also “roots” their phone so they can see all the contact-tracing Bluetooth signals it picks up from other users. When one of those passersby later reports that they’re Covid-19 positive, the snoop’s app will receive all their keys from the contact-tracing server, and they’ll be able to match up the codes the user broadcast at the moment they passed the camera, identifying a stranger as Covid-19 positive. They might go as far as posting the picture of that infected person on Nextdoor to warn neighbors to watch out for them.

“While the system itself has anonymous properties, the implementation—because it’s broadcasting identifiers—isn’t anonymous,” Soltani says. “If you know you might end up on Nextdoor as someone who’s infected, you might not be willing to use one of these apps.”

Will the Tech Be Used for Ads?

The good news is that ad-targeting firms wouldn’t be allowed to directly implement Google and Apple’s Bluetooth contact-tracing protocol to track users. But another scenario suggested by Johns Hopkins University cryptographer Matthew Green points to a variant of the “correlation attack” above that might be useful for commercial tracking. An advertising firm could put Bluetooth beacons in stores that collect contact-tracing codes emitted by visiting customers. The firm could then use the public health app to download all the keys of people who are later diagnosed as Covid-19 positive and generate all their codes for the last two weeks. That method could hypothetically determine which trail of codes represented a single person, and follow them from store to store.

But even as Green described that scenario, he was quick to downplay it himself. First, the attack would only allow retailers to track people who reported themselves as Covid-19 positive, not the vast majority of users. It would also only allow those few infected people to be tracked for just the two weeks prior to their diagnosis. Besides, Green notes, advertisers already have plenty of tools to track movements from store to store, from credit card transactions to sneaky ultrasonic signals sent from apps. Would they really risk the scandal of specifically surveilling Covid-19-positive people just to add one more tracking method to their arsenal?

“It’s definitely possible that some evil advertiser could use this to augment their data sets,” Green says. “But, gosh, it really requires a lot of evil. And it seems to me like a small case.”

Keeping ad tracking as an unlikely scenario, of course, depends on Apple and Google continuing to deny advertisers access to the API—or deprecating the feature altogether—after the coronavirus threat fades.

What About False Positives?

Aside from surveillance issues, there’s also the problem of making sure a Bluetooth contact-tracing app doesn’t overwhelm people with incorrect warnings that they’ve been exposed. Those false positives could come users self-diagnosing incorrectly or worse, trolls spamming the system. University of Cambridge computer scientist and cryptographer Ross Anderson warned that “the performance art people will tie a phone to a dog and let it run around the park” to create canine contact-tracing chaos.
Cristina White, the executive director of contact-tracing project Covid-Watch and a Stanford computer scientist, suggests a solution to those problems: Only allow people to report a positive diagnosis with a health care provider’s approval. To create that safeguard, Covid-Watch would distribute a separate app to health care providers that generates unique confirmation codes.

#Coronavirus #Contact_tracing #Apple #Google

« The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder », Wired, Sandra Upson, 15.04.2020
▻https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline-brilliant-young-coder

Amazon’s New ‘Essential Items’ Policy Is Devastating Sellers | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-essential-items-policy-devastating-sellers

Due to Covid-19, Amazon is only accepting certain supplies at its warehouses. Small businesses are already feeling the pinch. Bernie Thompson is exactly the kind of entrepreneur Amazon likes to celebrate. In 2009 the former Microsoft developer started his own electronics company, Plugable Technologies. He now employs 35 people in Redmond, Washington, and primarily sells his signature laptop docking stations through Amazon. In 2016, CEO Jeff Bezos highlighted Plugable in a letter to (...)

#santé #domination #Amazon

##santé

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How Apple and Google Are Enabling Covid-19 Bluetooth Contact-Tracing | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/apple-google-bluetooth-contact-tracing-covid-19

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Since Covid-19 began its spread across the world, technologists have proposed using so-called contact-tracing apps to track infections via smartphones. Now, Google and Apple are teaming up to give contact-tracers the ingredients to make that system possible—while in theory still preserving the privacy of those who use it.

On Friday, the two companies announced a rare joint project to create the groundwork for Bluetooth-based contact-tracing apps that can work across both iOS and Android phones. In mid-May, they plan to release an application programming interface that apps from public health organizations can tap into. The API will let those apps use a phone’s Bluetooth radios—which have a range of about 30 feet—to keep track of whether a smartphone’s owner has come into contact with someone who later turns out to have been infected with Covid-19. Once alerted, that user can then self-isolate or get tested themselves.

Several projects, including ones led by developers at MIT, Stanford, and the governments of Singapore and Germany, have already proposed, and in some cases implemented, similar Bluetooth-based contact-tracing systems. Google and Apple declined to say which specific groups or government agencies they’ve been working with. But they argue that by building operating-level functions those applications can tap into, the apps will be far more effective and energy efficient. Most importantly, they’ll be interoperable between the two dominant smartphone platforms.

In the version of the system set to roll out next month, the operating-system-level Bluetooth tracing would allow users to opt in to a Bluetooth-based proximity-detection scheme when they download a contact-tracing app. Their phone would then constantly ping out Bluetooth signals to others nearby while also listening for communications from nearby phones.

Until now, however, Bluetooth-based schemes like the one White described suffered from how Apple limits access to Bluetooth when apps run in the background of iOS, a privacy and power-saving safeguard. It will lift that restriction specifically for contact-tracing apps. And Apple and Google say that the protocol they’re releasing will be designed to use minimal power to save phones’ battery lives. “This thing has to run 24-7, so it has to really only sip the battery life,” said one of the project’s spokespeople.

In a second iteration of the system rolling out in June, Apple and Google say they’ll allow users to enable Bluetooth-based contact-tracing even without an app installed, building the system into the operating systems themselves. This would be opt-in as well. But while the phones would exchange “beacon” numbers via Bluetooth, users would still need to download a contact-tracing app to either declare themselves as Covid-19 positive or to learn if someone they’ve come into contact with was diagnosed.

Google and Apple’s Bluetooth-based system has some significant privacy advantages over GPS-based location-tracking systems that have been proposed by other researchers including at MIT, the University of Toronto, McGill, and Harvard. Since those systems collect location data, they would require complex cryptographic systems to avoid collecting information about users’ movements that could potentially expose highly personal information, from political dissent to extramarital affairs.

With Google and Apple’s announcement, it’s clear that the companies chose to skirt those privacy pitfalls and implement a system that collects no location data. “It looks like we won,” says Stanford’s White, whose Covid-Watch project, part of a consortium of projects using a Bluetooth-based system, had advocated for the Bluetooth-only approach. “It’s clear from the API that it was influenced by our work. It’s following the exact suggestions from our engineers about how implement it.”

#Contact_tracing #Google #Apple

The Science of This Pandemic Is Moving at Dangerous Speeds | WIRED
article du 28/03, détaillant particulièrement l’affaire des 50% de faux positifs, article isolé paru sur un journal chinois puis rapidement retiré.
▻https://www.wired.com/story/the-science-of-this-pandemic-is-moving-at-dangerous-speeds

When it comes to findings, the Covid-19 train is an express, while the rigorous science coach is a local. Until that local arrives at its final destination, it may be wise to label all this research—preprints, peer-reviewed papers, and for goodness’ sake, pronouncements from Donald Trump— with a black-box warning: “There is some evidence for this now. It will likely turn out to be at least partially wrong.”

In other words, let’s all stay six studies away.

AI is An Ideology, Not A Technology | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-ai-is-an-ideology-not-a-technology

A leading anxiety in both the technology and foreign policy worlds today is China’s purported edge in the artificial intelligence race. The usual narrative goes like this : Without the constraints on data collection that liberal democracies impose and with the capacity to centrally direct greater resource allocation, the Chinese will outstrip the West. AI is hungry for more and more data, but the West insists on privacy. This is a luxury we cannot afford, it is said, as whichever world power (...)

#algorithme #technologisme #travail

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Coronavirus Exposes Workers to the Risks of the Gig Economy | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-exposes-workers-risks-gig-economy

Drivers for Uber and Lyft in Seattle say demand for rides has plummeted, and they have few workplace benefits to fall back on. For the past nine years, Mandolin Noir has taken care of other people’s pets around Seattle, often working through companies like Rover and Wag. The work is steady ; she visits the dogs when their owners are at work, and checks in on the cats when owners travel out of town. But in the past week, she’s faced a cascade of cancelations. Her clients who work for Amazon (...)

#Facebook #Lyft #Trover #Uber #GigEconomy #santé #travail

##santé

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Greta Thunberg’s Online Attackers Reveal a Grim Pattern | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/greta-thunberg-online-harassment

https://media.wired.com/photos/5e5d5a2b716bcb00081f9057/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/Cul-greta-1088303950.jpg

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is 17 years old, legally a minor. Despite her age, in the past week, numerous actual adults have made her the subject of many forms of online harassment. Some say she ought to be “burnt at the stake”; others have circulated images of a sex doll that resembles Thunberg and purportedly “speaks” using recordings of her voice; still others created and distributed a cartoon that appears to depict the activist being sexually assaulted.

The internet didn’t create this problem, but it does amplify it. The same forces that have allowed Thunberg and her message to climb to global virality are, in the hands of those who wish to discredit the teenager, the best weapon to use against her. While these smears are especially troubling in Thunberg’s case because of her age, they mirror the kinds of targeted online harassment employed against many people and groups by those who wish to silence them. The behavior is shocking, but not a shock.

To begin with, Thunberg is a woman on the internet. While there is debate about whether men or women experience more harassment online, studies have shown the harassment women experience tends to be more personal, more gendered, more sexual, and more likely to be intense enough to drive them off of the social media platform where they’re being harassed. “The saddest thing that has emerged from my research is that young women aged 18 to 30 have accepted harassment as part and parcel of being online,” says Jessica Vitak, who studies online privacy and security at the University of Maryland. “They have various ways of dealing with it, but they don’t include thinking, ‘This shouldn’t be happening, and I should be fighting to make it stop.’” Harassment of women online has become a norm.

The harassment is only heightened when the woman in question is, like Thunberg, a public figure. The Inter-Parliamentary Union, a global organization including the parliaments of 179 member countries, found that more than 80 percent of female parliamentarians had experienced psychological violence, the most common form being online harassment. According to Mona Lena Krook, who studies women in politics at Rutgers University, women activists like Thunberg have very similar experiences, and often in the exact form that Thunberg has been experiencing this week. “The first place people go are gender-based slurs or sexualizing tactics,” Krook says. “Photoshopped sexual images are really common. When you sexually objectify somebody, your perception of their competence and humanity changes. It’s about delegitimizing them to a broader audience.” Politicians and activists from Hillary Clinton to US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Malala Yousafzai are frequently pornified by their critics.

#Cyberharcèlement #Politique #Culture_du_viol #Greta_Thunberg

Apple Might Owe You $25 for Slowing Down Your iPhone | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/apple-iphone-class-action-settlement/#intcid=recommendations_wired-homepage-right-rail-popular_6683a9a9-a2f4-4ae4-

Cupertino insists it did nothing wrong when it throttled aging handsets. But the decision will cost Apple hundreds of millions in payouts. Remember Apple’s “Batterygate,” back in 2017 ? It’s understandable if more imminent news stories, like Covid-19 and the US presidential election, have pushed old iPhone controversies to the far corners of your brain. But if you happened to own an iPhone 6, 7, or SE, and at some point you updated those phones to specific version of iOS software before (...)

#Apple #iPhone #smartphone #procès #obsolescence #FTC

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Companies Are Stealing Influencers’ Faces | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-instagram-influencers-stolen-faces

Fast fashion sellers are using social media stars’ images without permission—and there’s not much they can do about it. The first time Lucy Kyselica’s face was stolen, it turned up in the window of a beauty salon in small-town America. Kyselica is a Dutch beauty YouTuber who mostly makes videos about historical hairdos, but she had also made a video showing her subscribers how to thread their own eyebrows. The salon took a screengrab from that video, enlarged it to poster size, and used it to (...)

#Facebook #Instagram #influenceur #copyright #lobbying

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Airbnb Has Devoured London. Here’s the Data to Prove It | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/airbnb-has-devoured-london-heres-the-data-to-prove-it

https://media.wired.com/photos/5e45b70b6fd0760009425833/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/Biz-londondoors-182770006.jpg

The number of Airbnb listings in London has quadrupled in the last four years as more and more of the city’s housing stock has been gobbled up by short-term rental companies. As of May 2019, 80,770 properties in London were listed on Airbnb, with a staggering 23 percent, or 11,200, of these thought to be in breach of a legal 90-day limit in the capital.

The new data, compiled by City Hall, shows that across all Airbnb listings in London, just one percent of the capital’s hosts were behind 15 percent, or 7,440, of the properties listed.
Wired UK

This story originally appeared on WIRED UK.

Airbnb doesn’t make its data available to officials and regulators, meaning local authorities have to use third-party tools to try and regulate the abuse of the platform. City Hall’s figures, compiled using analytics tool Inside Airbnb, also show that 30 percent of Airbnb hosts in London have three or more listings advertised on the platform. The rate of growth outside the center of the capital has been even more extreme, with Airbnb listings in outer London increasing fifteen-fold between 2015 and 2019. Across London, 56 percent of properties on Airbnb—or 45,070 listings—are entire homes.

Airbnb contre l’occupation par les résidents

In Camden and Westminster, two of the London boroughs worst affected by the rise of short-term rentals, up to seven percent of the total housing stock is advertised on Airbnb. Data compiled by Camden council reveals that of the 7,100 whole properties listed on platforms such as Airbnb and Booking.com in 2019, a staggering 48 percent exceeded the 90-day legal limit. Camden council currently has 6,000 families on its housing waiting list.

#Airbnb #Londres #Extractivisme_de_plateforme

Why the FTC Wants to Revisit Hundreds of Deals by Big Tech | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/ftc-special-order-review-big-tech-killer-acquisitions

Silicon Valley’s “if you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em” approach comes under federal scrutiny. Some antitrust experts say better late than never. When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $22 billion in 2014, many observers scratched their heads. The smaller messaging platform had annual revenues in the low tens of millions. How could it be worth so much ? Soon enough, however, Facebook’s logic became clear. While little noticed in the US, WhatsApp was already a juggernaut overseas, with hundreds of millions (...)

#Alphabet #DoubleClick #Google #Amazon #Facebook #Picasa #Snapchat #WhatsApp #Zappos #AdMob #domination #lutte #FTC #WholeFoods #Apple #Microsoft #Nest #Gmail #Instagram (...)

##GooglePhotos

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The Digital Colonialism Behind .tv and .ly

Country-specific domain names can generate a lot of money—but for whom?

▻https://www.wired.com/story/the-digital-colonialism-behind-tv-and-ly

#DNS #ICANN #ccTLD

(Some facts are a bit distorted in the paper, but the issues are real.