One in six US adults (or around 39 million people) now own a voice-activated smart speaker, according to research from NPR and Edison Research. The Smart Audio Report claims that uptake of these devices over the last three years is “outpacing the adoption rates of smartphones and tablets.” Users spent time using speakers to find restaurants and businesses, playing games, setting timers and alarms, controlling smart home devices, sending messages, ordering food, and listening to music and books. Over half of respondents keep their smart speaker in the living room, followed by the kitchen (21 percent), and master bedroom (19 percent).

In December, a dispute following an online wageredCall of Duty match resulted in the death of a 28-year-old Kansas man after a faked call led a SWAT team to his house. Los Angeles police quickly arrested Tyler Barriss, the man responsible for making the call, and this week, he was charged with felony involuntary manslaughter and two additional counts.

Ben Lorica, O'Reilly's chief data scientist, has posted slides and notes from his talk at last December's Strata Data Conference in Singapore, "We need to build machine learning tools to augment machine learning engineers." (more…)

Facebook plans major changes to the News Feed in 2018 designed to promote more “meaningful” interactions, the company said Thursday. Facebook plans to promote posts that generate discussions over those that are passively consumed, it said. Company executives say they hope the changes will make people feel better about using Facebook, following a year in which critics have warned of its negative effects on society and high-profile former employees have distanced themselves from their creation.



I find it hard to get on board with the idea of filling my home with smart security cameras for a number of reasons, not the least of which is privacy. But there’s one smart camera at CES this year that has a clever solution to the whole spying-on-you problem: just have the camera look away.

Jeroen Boeye is a data scientist who was parsing the power output of his panels, and noticed that they were influenced -- as you'd expect -- by the trees near his house, which got in the way of direct sunlight.

Given an audio waveform, researchers can now produce a virtually identical version that makes speech-recognition software transcribe something else entirely.

In Delhi sollen Eltern in Zukunft den Unterricht Ihrer Kinder an staatlichen Schulen über eine App auf dem Mobiltelefon in Echtzeit verfolgen können. Behörden bekommen sogar einen umfassenderen Zugriff. Die App der Eltern soll Extra-Funktionen bekommen.

A decade ago, smart devices promised to change the way we think and interact, and they have – but not by making us smarter. Eric Andrew-Gee explores the growing body of scientific evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds

Current state of online #tracking: your unspecified personal data is processed by unknown third parties for unknown purposes. It is literally unknown, even to the website you are visiting!

The goal of this article is to provide a historical context of how JavaScript tools have evolved to what they are today in 2017. We’ll start from the beginning and build an example website like the dinosaurs did — no tools, just plain HTML and JavaScript. Then we’ll introduce different tools incrementally to see the problems that they solve one at a time. With this historical context, you’ll be better able to learn and adapt to the ever-changing JavaScript landscape going forward

Now let’s assume you have given consent to an app to get access to your account data at Lloyds and maybe your savings account at Nationwide building society, and the joint account you have with your partner at NatWest. The idea behind open banking is that apps (which must be FCA-regulated) will be able to “aggregate” everything in one single at-a-glance screen, constantly sweeping your accounts, helping you budget, spotting where you can make more savings, allowing you to more easily switch money from one provider to another, even analysing your gas bill to tell you of a £125 saving and doing all the switching work for you. It sounds great - until it goes wrong.

On an average day, people around the world watch one billion hours of video on YouTube. Most of those—70%—are recommended by YouTube’s algorithms, chief product officer Neal Mohan revealed at CES, as reported by CNET. The recommendations keep mobile users watching for more than 60 minutes at a time, on average, he said.

5000 Dollar Bug Bounty brachte einem europäischen Forscherteam das Aufspüren einer diffizilen Datenschutzlücke bei Facebook ein.

Ende Mai 2017 fanden Forscher aus den USA, Deutschland und Frankreich heraus, wie sich Werbekunden unautorisierten Zugriff auf die Telefonnummern von Facebook-Nutzern verschaffen können. In ihrem Forschungsbericht stellen sie dar, wie man das Marketing-Tool für Werbetreibende trickreich missbrauchen konnte.

Innenminister Kickl will auf die Location History auf den Smartphones Schutzsuchender zugreifen.

Ausweiskontrollen, Fahrzeugkontrollen und andere Schikanen. Warum ich gegen die Einschränkung der Rechtsextremismus-Berichterstattung durch die Polizei vor Gericht gehe.

Einen E-POSTBRIEF (SIC!)? Seit ich mich vor Jahren bei diesem Dienst der Deutschen Post AG angemeldet habe, habe ich von keinem Dritten je eine Nachricht darüber erhalten. Lediglich die Mitteilungen des Anbieters selbst landeten im Postfach. Daher war dieses bei mir auch völlig in Vergessenheit geraten und es war nur dem Umstand, dass ich sehr an meiner ersten Mobilfunknummer hänge und diese immer noch nutze, zu verdanken, dass diese Info mich überhaupt erreichte.

Updated list of >600 third party companies PayPal shares personal data with, effective as of 1 Jan 2018 (EU version):

The inability of law enforcement authorities to access data from electronic devices due to powerful encryption is an "urgent public safety issue," FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Tuesday in remarks that sought to renew a contentious debate over privacy and security. From a report: The FBI was unable to access data from nearly 7,800 devices in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 with technical tools despite possessing proper legal authority to pry them open, a growing figure that impacts every area of the agency's work, Wray said during a speech at a cyber security conference in New York. "This is an urgent public safety issue," Wray added, while saying that a solution is "not so clear cut."

The same-day shipping and delivery market is bursting with companies that want to ensure your packages get to you incredibly fast. One of the newest entrants is August, the smart lock company that was acquired by Assa Abloy last year. At CES, August announced it's expanding its trial in-home delivery service called August Access through a partnership with Deliv, a last-mile delivery service that specializes in same-day delivery. Deliv currently serves more than 4,000 retailers across 1,400 cities in the US, allowing August to provide those retailers with Deliv same-day delivery and August Access in-home delivery.