Brain decoder can eavesdrop on your inner voice
Intellihub.com
Oct 30, 2014
As you read this, your neurons are firing – that brain activity can now be decoded to reveal the silent words in your head
New Scientist
TALKING to yourself used to be a strictly private pastime. That’s no longer the case – researchers have eavesdropped on our internal monologue for the first time. The achievement is a step towards helping people who cannot physically speak communicate with the outside world.
“If you’re reading text in a newspaper or a book, you hear a voice in your own head,” says Brian Pasley at the University of California, Berkeley. “We’re trying to decode the brain activity related to that voice to create a medical prosthesis that can allow someone who is paralysed or locked in to speak.”
When you hear someone speak, sound waves activate sensory neurons in your inner ear. These neurons pass information to areas of the brain where different aspects of the sound are extracted and interpreted as words.
Ontario to ban smoking on patios and playgrounds
Metro
Nov 7, 2014
TORONTO – Ontario will ban smoking on all restaurant and bar patios as well as at playgrounds and publicly owned sports fields starting Jan. 1, 2015, the Liberal government announced Friday.
Associate Health Minister Dipika Dameria said regulations will also be amended to ban the sale of tobacco on college and university campuses.
The changes to the Smoke Free Ontario Act will replace a patchwork of municipal regulations governing smoking on restaurant and bar patios, and will not hurt their businesses, she added.
Facebook boosted US election turnout via psychology experiment, company reveals
RT USA
Published time: November 04, 2014 05:54
Edited time: November 04, 2014 07:36
Reuters/Dado Ruvic
Facebook manipulated the news feeds of almost 2 million American users during the 2012 presidential election without telling them. The manipulation led to a 3 percent increase in voter turnout, according to the company’s own data scientist.
In a stunning revelation, the three months prior to Election Day in 2012 saw Facebook “tweak” the feeds of 1.9 million Americans by sharing their friends’ hard news posts rather than the usual personal posts. The effect was felt most by occasional Facebook users who reported in a survey they paid more attention to the government because of their friends’ hard news feeds. Facebook didn’t tell users about this psychology experiment, but it boosted voter turnout by 3 percent.
The experiment was first shared with the public in two talks given by Facebook’s data scientist, Lada Adamic, in the fall of 2012, and more details were disclosed recently by Mother Jones. In those talks, Adamic said a colleague at Facebook, Solomon Messing, “tweaked” the feeds. Afterwards, Messing surveyed the group and found that voter turnout and political engagement grew from a self-reported 64 percent to more than 67 percent.
AUDIO — It is Now Time to Walk Out of Hell (Thomas Sheridan Lecture)
Thomas Sheridan
May 20, 2013
http://thomassheridanofficialblog.blo…
Ello -The Facebook Killer?
September 26, 2014 (Tony Cartalucci – LocalOrg) – Ello, a social network alternative to Facebook is expanding its user base immensely, even as it remains in beta testing. Market watchers and tech trend analysts attribute the influx of users indicative of Facebook’s waning popularity due to its invasive, profit-driven, monopolistic, and downright creepy conduct. Facebook’s incremental, manipulative policy and terms of use have been described as everything from a greedy business practice, to a government sanctioned means of mass manipulation and soft censorship.
It was inevitable that start-ups and activists would seek to offer Facebook users an alternative that allowed social media to be used as a tool of empowerment, not insidious manipulation and censorship. Ello appears to be tapping into that with its manifesto which states:
Your social network is owned by advertisers.
Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold.
We believe there is a better way. We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership.
We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce and manipulate — but a place to connect, create and celebrate life.
You are not a product.
In theory, not only does Ello’s manifesto sound ideal, it is likely to attract a multitude of disillusioned Facebook users fed up with the big-tech’s monopoly, but who have stayed aboard for a lack of a better alternative.
Market Watch in an article titled, “Facebook killer called Ello gets the timing right,” reported:
There has been a lot of chatter on social media this week about a new social network called Ello, which is getting buzz for its anti-Facebook Inc. stance. But is the start-up, which accepts no advertising and does no data mining, ready for prime time?
Ello has apparently been gaining such a huge influx of new users that its servers were having problems in the past two days, despite the requirement that you need an invitation to join.
Market Watch notes that Ello’s popularity is due more to Facebook’s shortcomings than Ello’s superior performance – Ello which is admittedly still in beta testing and with features still being incrementally added.
I’m terrified of my new TV: Why I’m scared to turn this thing on — and you’d be, too
by Michael Price
Salon.com
Oct 30, 2014
(Credit: cobalt88 via Shutterstock)
From facial recognition to personal data collection, this thing is downright scary — and so are the implications
I just bought a new TV. The old one had a good run, but after the volume got stuck on 63, I decided it was time to replace it. I am now the owner of a new “smart” TV, which promises to deliver streaming multimedia content, games, apps, social media and Internet browsing. Oh, and TV too.
The only problem is that I’m now afraid to use it. You would be too — if you read through the 46-page privacy policy.
The amount of data this thing collects is staggering. It logs where, when, how and for how long you use the TV. It sets tracking cookies and beacons designed to detect “when you have viewed particular content or a particular email message.” It records “the apps you use, the websites you visit, and how you interact with content.” It ignores “do-not-track” requests as a considered matter of policy.
It also has a built-in camera — with facial recognition. The purpose is to provide “gesture control” for the TV and enable you to log in to a personalized account using your face. On the upside, the images are saved on the TV instead of uploaded to a corporate server. On the downside, the Internet connection makes the whole TV vulnerable to hackers who have demonstrated the ability to take complete control of the machine.
More troubling is the microphone. The TV boasts a “voice recognition” feature that allows viewers to control the screen with voice commands. But the service comes with a rather ominous warning: “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.” Got that? Don’t say personal or sensitive stuff in front of the TV.
You may not be watching, but the telescreen is listening.
I do not doubt that this data is important to providing customized content and convenience, but it is also incredibly personal, constitutionally protected information that should not be for sale to advertisers and should require a warrant for law enforcement to access.
Unfortunately, current law affords little privacy protection to so-called “third party records,” including email, telephone records, and data stored in “the cloud.” Much of the data captured and transmitted by my new TV would likely fall into this category. Although one federal court of appeals has found this rule unconstitutional with respect to email, the principle remains a bedrock of modern electronic surveillance.
According to retired Gen. David Petraeus, former head of the CIA, Internet-enabled “smart” devices can be exploited to reveal a wealth of personal data. “Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvester,” he reportedly told a venture capital firm in 2012. “We’ll spy on you through your dishwasher,” read one headline. Indeed, as the “Internet of Things” matures, household appliances and physical objects will become more networked. Your ceiling lights, thermostat and washing machine — even your socks — may be wired to interact online. The FBI will not have to bug your living room; you will do it yourself.
FBI pretended to be Seattle newspaper in order to hack suspect’s computer
End the Lie
Oct 28, 2014
Screenshot from http://seattletimes.com
The editor of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Seattle Times newspaper says she’s “outraged” to learn only this week that the FBI made a mock-up of the publication’s website in 2007 in order to spread spyware onto the computer of a suspect.
When agents with the Seattle division of the FBI swarmed the home of a 15-year-old high school student that year and charged him with making bomb threats, media reports noted that the arrest was made possible with the use of a so-called “Computer & Internet Protocol Address Verifier” program, or CIPAV, that had been remotely installed on the individual’s machine to collect and then communicate to the authorities the user-specific information that eventually identified the suspect. The student later pleaded guilty to emailing repeated bomb threats to Timberline High School and was sentenced to 90 days in juvenile detention.
Until this week, how the FBI actually went about sneaking the CIPAV program onto the student’s computer was a matter that went unreported. After digging through a trove of emails previously obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, however, American Civil Liberties Union technologist Chris Soghoian stumbled upon details this week showing that authorities accomplished the installation by sending a malicious link disguised as a Seattle Times news article to a social media account used by their suspect.
PN 