New AI Can Write and Rewrite Its Own Code to Increase Its Intelligence:
• A company has developed a type of technology that allows a machine to effectively learn from fewer examples and refine its knowledge as further examples are provided.
• This technology could be applied to everything from teaching a smartphone to recognize a user’s preferences to helping autonomous driving systems quickly identify obstacles.
Futurism: New AI Can Write and Rewrite Its Own Code to Increase Its Intelligence »
“However, there is one right that young people are less keen on extending to others: the right to say what you want. Overall, fewer than half of those polled agreed that people should be allowed to express non-violent opinions even if they offend minorities. In Britain and Germany, for instance, only 46% and 48% did.
The right to free speech is not absolute, as anyone who shouts “fire” in a crowded theatre will soon discover. At the same time, the recent polling data bolster the view that today′s youth are embracing a right not to be offended, which threatens to squelch necessary debate. Time will tell whether this group starts to dedicate itself to winning arguments rather than to preventing them from occurring.”
The Economist: Young people and free speech »
The decentralized marketplace Openbazaar has been continuously building its platform since inception. Now the Bitcoin-powered marketplace has finally merged Tor integration into the Openbazaar platform adding a long-awaited layer of privacy to the program.
Openbazaar Integrates Tor – The Platform’s Most Requested Feature »
Opponents of the plan, including some small web publishers, worry it could choke traffic to their sites by creating a thicket of regulations that will dissuade Google and other platforms from driving users to them. These critics also argue that a publisher’s right will create a “link tax” (a phrase that supporters liken to a slur) but won’t achieve its backers’ main aim: to save the news sector’s broken business model. (…)
Comodini Cachia will present a report next month, including suggested amendments to the proposal, but it’s unclear whether the hard protections demanded by the publishers will survive.
Politico.eu: Plan to make Google pay for news hits rocks »
CETA raises serious questions to the protection of our online rights and freedoms. These concerns have been sadly ignored. We now turn to the EU Member States to stand up for the interest of their citizens by rejecting CETA.
Tomorrow – Thursday 16 February – the European Parliament votes on the EU Terrorism Directive. EDRi lists some of the things being wrong with this directive:
It’s a mess. A dangerous mess.
Read more and get all the links at EDRi: The time has come to complain about the Terrorism Directive »
Ars spoke with several legal experts, and contacted CBP itself (which did not provide anything beyond previously-published policies). The short answer is: your device probably will be seized (or “detained” in CBP parlance), and you might be kept in physical detention—although no one seems to be sure exactly for how long.
Ars Technica: What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at the US border? »
Since early last year, Snowden has quietly served as president of a small San Francisco–based nonprofit called the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Its mission: to equip the media to do its job at a time when state-sponsored hackers and government surveillance threaten investigative reporting in ways Woodward and Bernstein never imagined. “Newsrooms don’t have the budget, the sophistication, or the skills to defend themselves in the current environment,” says Snowden, who spoke to WIRED via encrypted video-chat from his home in Moscow. “We’re trying to provide a few niche tools to make the game a little more fair.”
Wired » Edward Snowden’s New Job: Protecting Reporters From Spies »
A central principle in EU Internet-related legislation is the so-called mere conduit rule.
Under the mere conduit principle of the EU E-Commerce Regulations of 2002,[1] network operators have no legal liability for the consequences of traffic delivered via their networks.
Who an information society service is provided that consists of the transmission in a communication network of information provided by a recipient of the service, or the provision of access to a communication network, Member States shall ensure that the service provider is not liable for the information transmitted, on condition that the provider: (a) does not initiate the transmission; (b) does not select the receiver of the transmission; and (c) does not select or modify the information contained in the transmission. The acts of transmission and of provision of access include the automatic, intermediate and transient storage of the information transmitted in so far as this takes place for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission in the communication network, and provided that the information is not stored for any period longer than is reasonably necessary for the transmission.
Today’s Swedish court ruling (and earlier European court rulings) to block The Pirate Bay is in direct conflict with this principle, as stated in the EU eCommerce directive.
The grounds for this seems to be the EU InfoSoc directive. The argument is that mere conduit does not apply when it concerns traffic to sites that do not adhere to notifications to remove content that is deemed illegal, e.g. when it comes to copyright infringements and intellectual property.
But this doesn’t make sense.
You cannot have a rule stating that ISP:s have no legal liability for the consequences of traffic relayed via their networks – unless illegal. That is the same as saying that ISP:s do have legal liability for the consequences of traffic relayed via their networks. And this is the opposite of what is stated in the eCommerce directive.
And even though the ISP in question have not been charged with any criminal offense – it is to be considered liable, as the verdict states that it will have to pay a hefty fine unless blocking The Pirate Bay. (The ISP also had to pay the copyright owners legal fees.)
I would say that we have a clear case of conflicting laws. And as the blocking verdict is only an interpretation of the InfoSoc directive, while the eCommerce directive states a very clear principle – the latter shall apply.
But I´m no lawyer. Reactions, opinions, and feedback are welcome in the comments below.
/ HAX
Two weeks ago, Sidd Bikkannavar flew back into the United States after spending a few weeks abroad in South America. An employee of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Bikkannavar had been on a personal trip, pursuing his hobby of racing solar-powered cars. He had recently joined a Chilean team, and spent the last weeks of January at a race in Patagonia. (…)
Bikkannavar says he was detained by US Customs and Border Patrol and pressured to give the CBP agents his phone and access PIN. Since the phone was issued by NASA, it may have contained sensitive material that wasn’t supposed to be shared. Bikkannavar’s phone was returned to him after it was searched by CBP, but he doesn’t know exactly what information officials might have taken from the device.
The Verge: A US-born NASA scientist was detained at the border until he unlocked his phone »
Ars Technica: NASA scientist detained at US border until he unlocked his phone »
