Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 5
Posts 1 - 5

Facebook Faces a New World as Officials Rein In a Wild Web

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 17.9.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | censorship, Facebook, marketing, privacy, social media, threat
Summary | Facebook’s head of global policy management recently agreed to remove anything that violates the Vietnamese law from the social network. Governments around the world (even in the US) are increasingly trying to keep control of what's happening online. As a result, governments and big tech companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook or Amazon don't always agree with each other. On the one hand, big tech companies want to have more control and power, and on the other hand, nations want to gain more control over people's online behvior. Facebook's desire to expand everywhere (e.g. in China) is one of the reasons for today's struggle between tech companies and nations. Facebook also faced some issues in Europe and Africa.
Image Description | Photograph of people using computers in a computer room, map of Facebook's users, two women laughing in front of a board displaying social media icons, Mark Zuckerberg and other people running in China, Mark Zuckerberg, his wife and daughters, glass building, people in front of a thumb-up sign, woman, crowd (some of them are using their phones), and people on their computers.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, Facebook, female(s), male(s), smartphone, social media

Teaching A.I. Systems to Behave Themselves

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 13.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Facebook, Google, threat
Summary | Artificial intelligence systems have made huge development leaps in recent times but there is still a lot of learning to do. The image recognition AI assistants of Facebook and Google demonstrate how, on the one hand, they can recognize a lot of images correctly if they have had enough data to learn from and, on the other hand, how it still makes bold mistakes. It suffices to manipulate a few pixels and the AI system gets confused. Developing AI systems not only takes a lot of data but also trial and error phases which are monitored and taught by human teachers.
Image Description | Programmers working on computers.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s)

As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 29.5.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | computer programming, threat
Summary | Computer programming classes are increasingly in demand at universities across the country. Reports of students plagiarizing and copying code from each other are however also increasing. It is difficult to find out whether students have cheated but identical mistakes are a dead giveaway. One programming professor has also written a programm to compare codes and find how similar they are indicating the likelihood that the two codes were collaboratively written.
Image Description | Image of a lecture hall showing the lecturer's laptop and an image of a female student walking on campus.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s)

Free Tools to Keep Those Creepy Online Ads From Watching You

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 18.2.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | marketing, privacy, threat
Summary | Many companies track potential customers' internet activity so that they find out when someone, for instance, has the flu and will likely respond to flu medication advertisements. They collect data about all users when they visit a tracking website and then tailor advertising to specific target groups. This is a violation of our privacy because this process is very obscure and it is difficult to protect oneself from it but there are a few softwares one can get to stop companies from tracking one's online activity.
Image Description | Hands typing on a laptop keyboard.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, hand(s)

Ask Alexa? No, Hear This Alexa

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 16.1.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, threat
Summary | Amazon's new chatbot Alexa is constructed to make life easier for us: it is an assistant that gets you the information you need or fetches (orders) groceries for you. You can operated without hands by simply calling "Alexa" and the microphone and speaker station will 'wake up' to follow your instruction. But while the artificial intelligence bot learns to be more humanoid from us, we are likely to lose human interactional abilities if we start speaking with robots on regular basis.
Image Description | Image of the Echo devices (microphone and speaker station for Alexa) in a storage unit.
Image Tags | speaker

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