company:ars technica uk

"Minding the gap, blind" - Leading vulnerable populations into a data-fostered power disbalance (yet again)?

An interesting piece caught my eye today: a feature published at Ars Technica UK quite sympathetically describes how Bluetooth beacons guide visually impaired (blind and partially sighted) people in the London metro.

The idea is great, no doubt. The author tested the technology and acknowledged how seamless it is to navigate the busy tunnels of the tube with its assistance.

▻https://arstechnica.co.uk/business/2016/10/london-underground-blind-beacons

However, further down I was reading, more upset I felt. The piece names the two companies — WayFindr and UsTwo — developing the technology and links to their respective websites. Then, it goes on interviewing London Underground’s director for operational support who praises the technology and explains that Google.org, Google’s charity arm, has co-funded the project. I went on to check out the two startups, and what I found concerns me.

Or, it’d be more appropriate to say, what I did not find, concerns me. Indeed:
– I found no trace whatsoever of technical specification for an alleged “open standard” developed by WayFindr: ▻https://www.wayfindr.net Amongst the few social networks featured (footer of the website), no GitHub or similar is listed. Moreover, there is no mention whatsoever about how the data WayFindr collects are managed.

– The situation is similar with UsTwo. They have a page labelled ’Legal’ (▻https://ustwo.com/legal), but it contains nothing related to data management, data collection, etc. UsTwo has a GitHub account (▻https://github.com/ustwo), but it is the regular front-end/Ansible/etc. stuff. Correct me if I am wrong, but it does not contain anything related to data collection, data management or data security.

I am not familiar with this project. However, the very one-sided and sympathetic feature that Ars UK ran rings a bell: is this a sponsored content that does not have the appropriate label? Or, worse, is it a piece that praises a program with no publicly available privacy and data management programs? As a reminder, the data producers here, as well as the clients, are visually impaired people: these are vulnerable people. The power disbalance is truly striking and utterly concerning.

Anti-innovation: EU excludes open source from new tech standards | Ars Technica UK
▻http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2016/04/anti-innovation-eu-excludes-open-source-from-new-tech-standards

That de facto exclusion of open source from this major new EU initiative is shocking, but not entirely unexpected. The European Commission has been steadily moving to marginalise open source for over a decade. — Permalink

#europe #opensource #technologie

The NSA’s SKYNET program may be killing thousands of innocent people | Ars Technica UK
►http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/02/the-nsas-skynet-program-may-be-killing-thousands-of-innocent-people

“Ridiculously optimistic” machine learning algorithm is “completely bullshit,” says expert.

In 2014, the former director of both the CIA and NSA proclaimed that “we kill people based on metadata.” Now, a new examination of previously published Snowden documents suggests that many of those people may have been innocent.

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2016/02/skynet-courier-detection-via-machine-learning-p3-normal-640x495.gif

(...) The highest scoring selector who travelled to Peshawar and Lahore is “PROB AHMED ZAIDAN”, Al-Jazeera’s long-time bureau chief in Islamabad.
As The Intercept reported, Zaidan frequently travels to regions with known terrorist activity in order to interview insurgents and report the news. But rather than questioning the machine learning that produced such a bizarre result, the NSA engineers behind the algorithm instead trumpeted Zaidan as an example of a SKYNET success in their in-house presentation, including a slide that labelled Zaidan as a “MEMBER OF AL-QA’IDA.”

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2016/02/skynet-courier-detection-via-machine-learning-p17-normal-640x495.gif

#machine_learning #stupidité_artificielle #drones #robots_tueurs

How Linux was born, as told by Linus Torvalds himself | Ars Technica UK
▻http://arstechnica.co.uk/business/2015/08/how-linux-was-born-as-told-by-linus-torvalds-himself

Even though Linus had rushed out to buy his PC as soon as he had scraped together the money to do so, he was unable to plunge into the world of Unix immediately, since it took several months for the Minix floppy disks to turn up. So he passed the time as any real coder would—by playing games like Prince of Persia under MS-DOS. He was also exploring the architecture of the Intel 80386 chip.

#linux #Linus_Torvalds #computer_history