All posts tagged: privacy

How to Watch the Knicks Parade on NYC Traffic Surveillance Cameras

How to Watch the Knicks Parade on NYC Traffic Surveillance Cameras

Published by skeptic

For the first time in 53 years, New York Knicks fans will be celebrating the team’s NBA championship win with a parade through lower Manhattan. Many New Yorkers will be showing up to party in person on Thursday morning, but not everyone will be able to make it to the event. For those who are celebrating from afar (or begrudgingly stuck at the office while the procession takes place), artist Morry Kolman has an option for you: watching via several traffic cameras along the parade route and surrounding City Hall, where the parade will end. Kolman is livestreaming the camera feeds as part of his project, GardenCam, which has been streaming and archiving traffic camera footage of street revelers throughout the Knicks’ historic finals run against the San Antonio Spurs. A native New Yorker, Kolman and his friends have suffered through many seasons of tragedy and loss. After an ecstatic game 2 win, Kolman felt like he wanted to do something to capture the “bigger energy rippling through the city,” he tells WIRED. After polling …

The UK Will Scan Asylum-Seekers’ Faces for Age Checks—Despite Knowing the Tech Is Flawed

The UK Will Scan Asylum-Seekers’ Faces for Age Checks—Despite Knowing the Tech Is Flawed

Published by skeptic

While the Home Office says face scanning is designed to be an “additional” tool for border officers and won’t “replace or overrule human judgment,” it did not answer questions about how it plans to use the technology in real-world environments. “In cases of uncertainty,” the spokesperson says, “individuals will always be treated as children until a further assessment is conducted.” Expanding Estimates The UK government first announced its plans to use face age estimation alongside border staff judgments to assess migrants in July 2025. Since then, the Home Office has delayed the rollout of the systems until 2027, saying it will use the “cutting-edge AI tech” to “crack down on fake claims” with the aim of stopping “adults attempting to game the system.” Over the past five years, AI face scans have emerged as a key component of controversial online age verification programs, as lawmakers have mandated social media platforms, porn websites, and some retailers check their users’ ages. It has also been trialled at some bars and shops in the UK. Face age estimation …

Apple plans to change its Hide My Email privacy feature that could make it less effective

Apple plans to change its Hide My Email privacy feature that could make it less effective

Published by skeptic

Apple’s plan to change a privacy feature that lets paying customers hide their real email addresses when creating online accounts could make it easier for apps and websites to block anonymous sign-ups. Apple’s Hide My Email is an iCloud+ feature that generates anonymous email addresses under the @icloud.com domain, which then forward messages to a person’s real email address. The reason these privately generated email addresses work is because they cannot be distinguished from regular Apple users, whose email addresses also use the @icloud.com domain. Apple said in a note to developers on Monday that in the coming weeks the company will move its anonymously generated email addresses to @private.icloud.com, effectively making it easier for apps and websites to know that an email address is private and block users from signing up. Existing addresses will continue to function and forward mail without interruption, Apple said in the note to developers. The company added that app and email providers would have to update their filtering to ensure that emails to customers who rely on the feature …

Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society

Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society

Published by skeptic

What ties the roster together more than any title or office is a shared preoccupation with artificial intelligence, longevity, and the near future. Asked on a sign-up form to predict the future, registrants returned again and again to the same theme: that AI will reorder work, war, education, and belief within a few years. Several foresee mass labor displacement and a swing back toward unions and government programs; others predict an “AI winter,” domestic terrorism targeting data centers, criminal defendants choosing AI lawyers over public defenders, or religious revival provoked by the disruption. “Societal degeneration,” predicted one person, “will continue to accelerate.” Members also list talents like “funhouse construction,” accent imitation, backcountry skiing, urban exploration, and “meditative and psychedelic inquiry into the nature of reality”; one offers “compassion and existential dread,” another “dinner parties, keeping secrets, remembering birthdays.” Their book recommendations skew toward the canonical and optimization-minded, Marcus Aurelius and Milan Kundera alongside Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets, Peter Attia’s Outlive, and, from at least one attendee, Thiel’s own Zero to One. Dialog also plays …

Trump Ramps up Education Department’s Dismantling With Changes on Special Education and Civil Rights

Trump Ramps up Education Department’s Dismantling With Changes on Special Education and Civil Rights

Published by Sam Flores

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday accelerated its dismantling of the Education Department, delegating much of its work to protect the nation’s at-risk students. The Department of Justice will take on enforcement of civil rights in education, while the Department of Health and Human Services will oversee special education, administration officials announced. With those moves, the Education Department has now carved away the vast majority of its functions for other agencies to handle. The two Education Department offices involved — the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services and the Office for Civil Rights — defend the rights of children with disabilities and those who experience discrimination based on race, sex or religion. Advocates worry the change could mean lapses in communication for families and school officials who need help. Trump, a Republican, campaigned on shutting down the Education Department, saying he would “move education back to the states where it belongs.” While only Congress can close the department, Trump’s education secretary, Linda McMahon, a billionaire and former CEO of World Wrestling …

Meta Tapped a Pentagon Supplier to Prototype Face Recognition for Its Glasses

Meta Tapped a Pentagon Supplier to Prototype Face Recognition for Its Glasses

Published by skeptic

Meta is testing face-recognition software built by a company that sells surveillance tools to police departments and the United States military, as it explores bringing the technology to its smart glasses, WIRED has learned. The arrangement is documented in a software license, obtained by WIRED, that was issued by Rank One Computing—a Denver-based company that derives roughly 80 percent of its revenue from government clients—and is tied to a test version of the Meta AI app that powers Meta’s Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. Rank One’s face recognition has been bought by the US Marshals Service, which uses it to confirm prisoners’ identities without fingerprinting them during transport, and by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service—the Navy’s police force—which purchased the company’s video tool, ROC Watch. Rank One developed long-range face recognition for US Special Operations Command under a government research contract, saying its software could identify a face from as far as a kilometer away. Police departments across the country use its algorithms too, embedded in tools they buy from other vendors. The license is …

The FCC Wants to Kill Burner Phones

The FCC Wants to Kill Burner Phones

Published by skeptic

After WIRED reported last week that Meta’s smart glasses app contained code that would enable the company to activate face-recognition features on the devices, the company removed the code this week without commenting on why or whether it plans to add such functionality back into the app later. Another WIRED investigation this week found that xAI’s Grok is still hosting sexualized deepfakes, including “nudified” images and videos, of celebrities and at least one prominent US politician. After limiting the release of its new Mythos-class AI model over concerns about its potential impacts on cybersecurity, Anthropic announced a model upgrade for partners in its limited-access group this week and launched a “safe” version of the model to the public with guardrails meant to keep the system from being used to fuel cyberattacks. Meanwhile, the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a new directive to federal agencies this week in reaction to new AI threats that includes a requirement to fix the most urgent software vulnerabilities in as little as three days. As Europe looks …

Trump privacy restrictions may reduce Census Bureau data : NPR

Trump privacy restrictions may reduce Census Bureau data : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

A new Trump administration order bans the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis from using statistical “noise,” or data for fuzzing survey results, to protect people’s privacy in their statistics. Anton Petrus/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Anton Petrus/Getty Images A wonky policy change by the Trump administration may spell the end of a wide swath of data from the Census Bureau, including key statistics used for redistricting, policymaking and research. Federal law requires the bureau to keep people anonymous in the data it produces from surveys and government records. But this month, the administration put out an order that many data experts say makes it harder, if not impossible, for the agency to balance protecting the confidentiality of people’s information with releasing useful data about local areas and small populations. The order by the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau, bans “noise infusion.” It’s one of the main privacy protection techniques the bureau has used for decades to make certain data fuzzy — to ensure that individual people, including members of minority …

Grok Is Still Hosting Sexualized Deepfakes of Famous Women

Grok Is Still Hosting Sexualized Deepfakes of Famous Women

Published by skeptic

Two prompts that were used to generate material on Grok were rejected by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Meta AI, and Anthropic’s Claude as inappropriate when tested by WIRED. Google’s Gemini did create an image of one celebrity being held in the hand of a giant, though it rejected another prompt. Google declined to comment. One Grok Imagine video, which was also posted to X, appeared to depict Ashley St. Clair altered to be dancing in a bikini. St. Clair was previously in a relationship with Musk and is mother to one of his children. In January, she started legal action against xAI after sexualized deepfakes of her allegedly appeared on X. After WIRED contacted X, the post was removed from the social media platform for violating its rules. Legal representatives for St. Clair in the X case did not immediately respond to the request for comment. “Elon Musk knowingly added a perverse feature to his platform that helps users undress women and children at the click of a button, with no regard for the predictable damage it …

Signal Alums Reveal ‘Encrypted Spaces,’ a System for Making Private Collaboration Apps

Signal Alums Reveal ‘Encrypted Spaces,’ a System for Making Private Collaboration Apps

Published by skeptic

Encrypted Spaces is, in some sense, the next generation of the Signal protocol, but for more complex and fully featured tools that go beyond messaging and calls, says Matt Green, a cryptography-focused professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins. “They’ve built a system that’s kind of an extension of what end-to-end encryption can be, where you have an actual architecture for doing end-to-end encrypted collaboration,” says Green, who reviewed a white paper outlining the Encrypted Spaces project and a prototype application. “You can think of it as the Signal protocol for collaboration apps.” Unlike Signal, however, the code that the Encrypted Spaces group has released is, for now, not a single, ready-for-use application. Instead, it’s a code repository that the group is inviting cryptography researchers and developers to review, with the goal of eventually allowing coders to build their own encrypted collaborative apps—but without needing any cryptography knowledge. “We want to make it so there’s no reason a developer wouldn’t want to make their application end-to-end encrypted, because it becomes so easy,” Trapp says. Change …