Facebook has begun notifying any of those users whose data is known to have been harvested and shared with data mining firm Cambridge Analytica.

On Your News Feed

If you are one of the 87 million people whose data has been shared, 1 million of whom are in the UK, when you log into your Facebook account, you will see a detailed message beginning with the words “We understand the importance of keeping your data safe.”

It is now understood that the data of 2.2 billion Facebook users was actually shared by Facebook, and all of these users will be receiving a message entitled “Protecting Your Information”. This message will include a link which will allow them to see what apps they use, and what information they have shared with those apps. Users will also be given the option to stop sharing information with the apps or to stop any access to third-party apps altogether.

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The latest energy report from Apple has stated that the company has hit a new milestone in green energy usage by making all of its 43 data centre sites across the world operate using 100% renewable energy.

Not Quite What It Seems

Although the effort is admirable, the claim that has led Apple’s CEO Tim Cook to stress that the company is committed to leaving the world better than it found it, is not as transparent as it appears.

It is not possible for all the data centres to be connected to a completely renewable energy supply at the moment, so what Apple actually means is that the data centres can be 100% ‘renewables powered’, thanks to the clean energy that Apple buys and puts back into the power grid that can be offset against its global power consumption.

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Dubai is once again in the news for being an adopter of new technologies after an announcement that it will be hosting a trial of digital vehicle number plates next month.

Smart Plates

The ‘smart plates’ will have digital screens, GPS and transmitters, and according to the head of the Vehicle Licensing Department at Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority (RTA), the digital plates will make life easier for drivers.

The trial of the new plates is scheduled to start next month and end in November, and one of the key things that is being tested, as well as the Roads and Transport Authority’s (RTA) Tag2Connect (T2C) platform, is thought to be whether any issues / problems may be caused to the hardware and operation of the plates by Dubai’s desert climate.

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A new report by security firm Positive Technologies shows that 1 in 10 employees would fall for a social engineering attack.

What Is A Social Engineering Attack?

Social engineering cyber-attacks rely upon the element of human error e.g. convincing / fooling a person into downloading malicious files, unwittingly corresponding with cyber-criminals, sharing contact information about employees and transferring money to hackers’ accounts, or clicking on phishing links.

Test

The results of the report are based on ‘penetration tests’ which involved sending 3,300 emails to employees containing links to websites, password entry forms and attachments. As the name suggests, a penetration test is an authorised simulated attack on a computer system, which is performed in order to evaluate the security of that system.

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Reports that the state-run university-based ‘Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology’ (KAIST) has been working on military robot research with defence company Hanwa have resulted in threats of a boycott by more than 50 AI researchers from 30 countries.

Killer Robots?

Although the threat of the boycott of KAIST appears to have been effective in exposing and causing KAIST to agree to stop any work related to the development of lethal autonomous weapons (killer robots), the story has raised questions about ethical red-lines and the regulation of technology in this area.

KAIST opened its research centre for the convergence of national defence and artificial intelligence on 20 February, with the reported intention of providing a foundation for developing national defence technology. It has been reported that a now-deleted announcement about the work of the centre highlighted a focus on areas like AI-based command and decision systems, navigation algorithms, large-scale unmanned undersea vehicles, AI-based smart aircraft training systems, as well as smart object tracking and recognition technology.

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Police in Australia are reported to be using data recorded by a murder victim’s Apple smartwatch to help catch her killer.

Murder

The victim and owner of the smartwatch was Grandmother Myrna Nilsson, who was found dead in the laundry of her Valley View home in Adelaide’s north-east in September 2016.

The prime suspect in the murder case is daughter-in-law Caroline Dela Rose Nilsson, who was found gagged and distressed at the scene, and who told Police that her mother-in-law had been followed home by (and had argued at length with) a group of men in a car.

How Could The Watch Data Help?

The Apple watch contains sensors that can measure fitness signals such as heart rate. The watch can also track a person’s movements and, being a watch, it can link the other signals to the exact time.

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A survey by consumer watchdog ‘Which?’ has revealed that more than half of UK customers across 12 providers, are having problems with their broadband service or price.

Which Providers?

The survey looked at the experiences of 1,900 customers of providers that collectively serve about 90% of UK broadband customers. These providers include BT, Sky, TalkTalk, Virgin Media and Zen Internet.

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A report by OECD says that previous forecasts may have exaggerated the impact of automation on jobs because the forecasts relied on a broad grouping together of jobs with the same title.

Previous Forecasts

One of the most influential forecasts of the effects that automation could have on our jobs was the 2013 forecast by Oxford University. Its worrying conclusions at the time included the bleak prediction that 47% of jobs in the US in 2010 and 35% in the UK were at “high risk” of being automated over the following 20 years.

Another report by PwC from May 2017 also claimed that over 30% of UK jobs could be lost to automation by the year 2030. That report also said that 44% of jobs in manufacturing (where there are already many robots e.g. car manufacturing), especially those involving manual work, look likely to go to AI led software or robots.

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In a bid to develop Siri and catch up with competitors in the digital assistant battle, Apple has hired Google’s top AI man, John Giannandrea.

Falling Behind

The battle to dominate the digital assistant market has been going on for some time now, but industry commentators have noted that Apple’s Siri, which was first introduced on the iPhone 4S in 2011, has fallen behind the competition i.e. Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.

Siri Problems

The problems that have plagued Apple’s Siri since its early lead and subsequent falling behind in the market are thought to include:

1. Infighting and internal politics within the Siri team at Apple.
2. Too many attempts to reorganise the basic underpinning technology.
3. Press criticism of the poor AI in Apple’s HomePod – the company’s attempt to compete with Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home smart speakers.

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