Category Archives: transparency

Large Language Models and Elections

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Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee released a video that it claims was “built entirely with AI imagery.” The content of the ad isn’t especially novel—a dystopian vision of America under a second term with President Joe Biden—but the deliberate emphasis on the technology used to create it stands out: It’s a “Daisy” moment for the 2020s.

We should expect more of this kind of thing. The applications of AI to political advertising have not escaped campaigners, who are already “pressure testing” possible uses for the technology. In the 2024 presidential election campaign, you can bank on the appearance of AI-generated personalized fundraising emails, text messages from chatbots urging you to vote, and maybe even some deepfaked campaign …

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Facebook Has No Idea What Data It Has

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This is from a court deposition:

Facebook’s stonewalling has been revealing on its own, providing variations on the same theme: It has amassed so much data on so many billions of people and organized it so confusingly that full transparency is impossible on a technical level. In the March 2022 hearing, Zarashaw and Steven Elia, a software engineering manager, described Facebook as a data-processing apparatus so complex that it defies understanding from within. The hearing amounted to two high-ranking engineers at one of the most powerful and resource-flush engineering outfits in history describing their product as an unknowable machine…

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Low-energy fluidic cells could shade and cool buildings dynamically

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A large percentage of a building’s energy usage is consumed by heating and cooling, but a new dynamic shading system designed by researchers at the University of Toronto could help. Inspired by the skin of krill, the system uses cells of blooming pigme… Continue reading Low-energy fluidic cells could shade and cool buildings dynamically→

Vendors are Fixing Security Flaws Faster

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Google’s Project Zero is reporting that software vendors are patching their code faster.

tl;dr

  • In 2021, vendors took an average of 52 days to fix security vulnerabilities reported from Project Zero. This is a significant acceleration from an average of about 80 days 3 years ago.
  • In addition to the average now being well below the 90-day deadline, we have also seen a dropoff in vendors missing the deadline (or the additional 14-day grace period). In 2021, only one bug exceeded its fix deadline, though 14% of bugs required the grace period.
  • Differences in the amount of time it takes a vendor/product to ship a fix to users reflects their product design, development practices, update cadence, and general processes towards security reports. We hope that this comparison can showcase best practices, and encourage vendors to experiment with new policies.
    …

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Latest transparent OLED display concepts enhance shopping experience

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Though LG Display’s transparent OLED technology has mostly been presented in concept form so far, the panels have made it out into the real world. And the company is hoping to seed more potential use cases with a bunch of new prototypes headed for CES … Continue reading Latest transparent OLED display concepts enhance shopping experience→

The Org nabs $20M led by Tiger Global to expand its platform based on public organizational charts

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LinkedIn normalized the idea of making people’s resume’s visible to anyone who wanted to look at them, and today a startup that’s hoping to do the same for companies and how they are organized and run is announcing some funding. The Org, which wants to build a global, publicly-viewable database of company organizational charts — […] Continue reading The Org nabs $20M led by Tiger Global to expand its platform based on public organizational charts→

The Importance of Transparency: Finding the Balance Between Security and Visibility

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Vulnerabilities are a simple fact of life. The goal for vendors and organizations is not to strive to create perfect hardware or software that has no vulnerabilities—there is no such thing. What’s important is ensuring that relevant details and context… Continue reading The Importance of Transparency: Finding the Balance Between Security and Visibility→