Lifeboat Foundation

AI-powered video technology is becoming ubiquitous, tracking our faces and bodies through stores, offices, and public spaces. In some countries the technology constitutes a powerful new layer of policing and government surveillance.

Fortunately, as some researchers from the Belgian university KU Leuven have just shown, you can often hide from an AI video system with the aid of a simple color printout.

Who said that? The researchers showed that the image they designed can hide a whole person from an AI-powered computer-vision system. They demonstrated it on a popular open-source object recognition system called YoLo(v2).

Continue reading “How to hide from the AI surveillance state with a color printout” »

Following recent trends in state-of-the-art developments, from cryptocurrencies and universal basic income to biohacking and the surveillance state, transhumanism has been moved into the limelight of political discourse to reshape humanity’s future.

Andrew Vladimirov, Information security specialist, biohacker and one of the original members of the Transhumanist Party UK, spoke in-depth with Sputnik about the rise of transhumanism and its implications.

Inmates will be under surveillance 24 hours a day.

https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/

Geoffrey Rockwell and Bettina Berendt’s (2017) article calls for ethical consideration around big data and digital archive, asking us to re-consider whether. In outlining how digital archives and algorithms structure potential relationships with whose testimony has been digitized, Rockwell and Berendt highlight how data practices change the relationship between research and researched. They make a provocative and important argument: datafication and open access should, in certain cases, be resisted. They champion the careful curation of data rather than large-scale collection of, pointing to the ways in which these data are used to construct knowledge about and fundamentally limit the agency of the research subject by controlling the narratives told about them. Rockwell and Berendt, drawing on Aboriginal Knowledge (AK) frameworks, amongst others, argue that some knowledge is just not meant to be openly shared: information is not an inherent good, and access to information must be earned instead. This approach was prompted, in part, by their own work scraping #gamergate Twitter feeds and the ways in which these data could be used to speak for others, in, without their consent.

From our vantage point, Rockwell and Berendt’s renewed call for an ethics of datafication is a timely one, as we are mired in media reports related to social media surveillance, electoral tampering, and on one side. Thanks, Facebook. On the other side, academics fight for the right to collect and access big data in order to reveal how gender and racial discrimination are embedded in the algorithms that structure everything from online real estate listings, to loan interest rates, to job postings (American Civil Liberties Union 2018). As surveillance studies scholars, we deeply appreciate how Rockwell and Berendt take a novel approach: they turn to a discussion of Freedom of Information (FOI), Freedom of Expression (FOE), Free and Open Source software, and Access to Information. In doing so, they unpack the assumptions commonly held by librarians, digital humanists and academics in general, to show that accumulation and datafication is not an inherent good.

In its most recent weekly US influenza surveillance report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that flu activity remains high across the nation. According to the agency, both the influenza A viruses H1N1 and H3N2, as well as influenza B viruses, are still making rounds through the population, with H3 viruses more frequently reported than H1N1.

China is developing a satellite with a powerful laser for anti-submarine warfare that researchers hope will be able to pinpoint a target as far as 500 metres below the surface.

It is the latest addition to the country’s expanding deep-sea surveillance programme, and aside from targeting submarines — most operate at a depth of less than 500 metres — it could also be used to collect data on the world’s oceans.

Project Guanlan, meaning “watching the big waves”, was officially launched in May at the Pilot National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology in Qingdao, Shandong. It aims to strengthen China’s surveillance activities in the world’s oceans, according to the laboratory’s website.

Continue reading “China is developing a new laser satellite meant to hunt down submarines more than 1,600 feet underwater” »

Trying to streamline an operation that spends more than $5 billion a year on developing new drugs, Novartis dispatched teams to jetmaker Boeing Co. and Swissgrid AG, a power company, to observe how they use technology-laden crisis centers to prevent failures and blackouts. That led to the design of something that looks like the pharma version of NASA’s Mission Control: a global surveillance hub where supercomputers map and chart Novartis’s network of 500 drug studies in 70 countries, trying to predict potential problems on a minute-by-minute basis.

A third of development costs comes from clinical trials. Novartis wants to make them cheaper and faster.

Following recent trends in state-of-the-art developments, from cryptocurrencies and universal basic income to biohacking and the surveillance state, transhumanism has been moved into the limelight of political discourse to reshape humanity’s future.

Andrew Vladimirov, Information security specialist, biohacker and one of the original members of the Transhumanist Party UK, spoke in-depth with Sputnik about the rise of transhumanism and its implications.

Whether it’s left there or right here… the tactics and destination look pretty much the same to me…

China is the world leader in facial recognition technology. Discover how the country is using it to develop a vast hyper-surveillance system able to monitor and target its ethnic minorities, including the Muslim Uighur population.

Continue reading “China: facial recognition and state control | The Economist” »