Tech News - Data

Facebook has been in the radar since quite some time now, with each month showing some major blunder by the company with respect to its privacy concerns. Last month Facebook opened up about exposing millions of user passwords in a plain text. Recently, one of the Facebook shareholders stood by a proposal to depose Mark Zuckerberg from its position as the board chairperson. And last evening, Facebook broke the news that it may have “unintentionally uploaded” the email contacts of 1.5 million new users on its site since May 2016, without their consent. What exactly happened at Facebook This news comes out when a security researcher highlighted that Facebook was asking some users to enter their email passwords when they signed up for new accounts for verifying their identities, in a move widely condemned by security experts. And it seems that the list of affected users is not just limited to the United States. https://twitter.com/robaeprice/status/1118668162378035200 In a statement to CNBC, a Facebook spokesperson said, “We’ve fixed the underlying issue and are notifying people whose contacts were imported. People can also review and manage contacts they share with Facebook in their settings.” According to a report by Business Insider when a user entered his/her email password, a message popped up which read, “it was "importing" your contacts, without asking for permission first.” The official statement from Facebook reads, “Last month we stopped offering email password verification as an option for people verifying their account when signing up for Facebook for the first time. When we looked into the steps people were going through to verify their accounts we found that in some cases people's email contacts were also unintentionally uploaded to Facebook when they created their account. We estimate that up to 1.5 million people's email contacts may have been uploaded. These contacts were not shared with anyone and we're deleting them. We've fixed the underlying issue and are notifying people whose contacts were imported. People can also review and manage the contacts they share with Facebook in their settings.” Facebook’s justification According to Facebook, the platform used to have a step in the account verification process where few users had the option to confirm their email address and then voluntarily import their email contacts onto Facebook. The idea behind the feature was to help users find their friends easily and also improve ads. When this process got redesigned in May 2016, the text that explained the step was removed but the feature remained intact. So, the email contacts were still being uploaded to the site without users being aware of the fact. With the company confessing such data breach acts repeatedly and stricter legislations coming into place, Facebook might face huge consequences for it in the near future. Facebook shareholders back a proposal to oust Mark Zuckerberg as the board’s chairperson Facebook AI introduces Aroma, a new code recommendation tool for developers Facebook AI open-sources PyTorch-BigGraph for faster embeddings in large graphs    

Microsoft is taking a stand against climate devastation by hiking its internal carbon tax in a new sustainability drive. On Tuesday, the company announced that it nearly doubling its internal carbon fee to $15 per metric ton on all carbon emissions. The company introduced the internal carbon tax back in 2012. The fee is charged based on energy use from the company’s data centers, offices, and factories, and emissions from its employees' business air travel. Now, the funds from this higher fee will maintain Microsoft’s carbon neutrality and help meet their sustainability goals. https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1118241283133149184 Microsoft is aiming to use 70% renewable energy to power its data centers by 2023. For comparison, Google reached 100% renewable energy for its global operations — including both their data centers and offices in 2017. In April, this year Apple announced that its global facilities are powered with 100 percent clean energy. This achievement includes retail stores, offices, data centers and co-located facilities in 43 countries. Amazon has been the slow one in this race. Although, Amazon announced that it would power data centers with 100 percent renewable energy; since 2018 Amazon has reportedly slowed down its efforts to use renewable energy using only 50 percent. Microsoft has started the construction of  17 new buildings at their Washington headquarters. These buildings will run on 100 percent carbon-free electricity. Also, the amount of carbon associated with the construction materials of these buildings will be reduced by at least 15 percent, with a goal of reaching 30 percent. This would be monitored through Embodied Carbon Calculator for Construction (EC3), a new tool to track the carbon emissions of raw building materials. What is missing from this plan, is a complete transition off of fossil fuels rather than relying on carbon offsets. Microsoft is also joining the Climate Leadership Council (CLC). CLC is an international policy institute which promotes a national carbon pricing approach. “In addition to our internal carbon tax”, Microsoft says, “we supported the recent Washington state ballot measure on pricing carbon and believe it’s time for a robust national discussion on carbon pricing to lower emissions in an economically sound way.” Microsoft is also aggregating and hosting the environmental data sets on its cloud platform, Azure, and make them publicly available. These data sets, Microsoft notes, “are large government datasets contain satellite. and aerial imagery, among other things, and require petabytes of storage. By making them available in our cloud, we will advance and accelerate the work of grantees and researchers around the world.” Finally, the company will also scale up the work it does with other nonprofits and companies tackling environmental issues through their own data and Artificial Intelligence expertise. Responsible tech leadership or climate washing? Although, Microsoft plans to address quite a number of climate change and sustainability issues, what is missing are commitments for structural and business goal level changes or commitments. A report by Gizmodo highlights the lengths that Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other tech companies are going to help the oil industry accelerate the climate crisis—and there continued profits from this process. Per Gizmodo, Bill Gates heads a $1 billion climate action fund and has published his own point-by-point plan for fighting climate change. Notably absent from that plan is “Empowering Oil & Gas with AI”. Microsoft is also two years into a seven-year deal—rumored to be worth over a billion dollars—to help Chevron, one of the world’s largest oil companies, better extract and distribute oil. Microsoft Azure has also partnered with Equinor, a multinational energy company to provide data services in a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Microsoft has also partnered with ExxonMobil to help it triple oil production in Texas and New Mexico. Microsoft also has a 7-year, multibillion-dollar deal with Chevron. Instead of making profits from these deals Microsoft could be prioritizing climate impacts in business decisions, including ending partnerships with fossil fuel companies that accelerate oil and gas exploration and extraction. https://twitter.com/MsWorkers4/status/1098693994903552000 https://twitter.com/MsWorkers4/status/1118540637899354113 Last week, Over 4,520 Amazon employees signed an open letter addressed to Jeff Bezos and Amazon board of directors asking for a company-wide action plan to address climate change and an end to the company’s reliance on dirty energy resources. Their demands: “define public goals and timelines to reduce emissions; complete ban from using fossil fuels; ending partnerships with fossil fuel companies; reducing harm caused by a company’s operations to vulnerable communities first; advocacy for local, federal, and international policies to reduce carbon emissions and fair treatment of all employees during extreme weather events linked to climate change.” Microsoft Workers 4 good who created their own petition for Microsoft to do better, endorsed the stand taken by Amazon employees and called for all employees to encourage their employers to take actions for climate change. Microsoft’s closed employee only petition was launched in February where Microsoft employees were asking the company to help them align employee’s retirement investments with Microsoft’s sustainability mission. https://twitter.com/MsWorkers4/status/1092942849522323456 4,520+ Amazon employees sign an open letter asking for a “company-wide plan that matches the scale and urgency of climate crisis” Minecraft is serious about global warming, adds a new (spigot) plugin to allow changes in climate mechanics. Google moving towards data centers with 24/7 carbon-free energy

A Debian maintainer, named, Mo Zhou, wrote a mail to Development of Debian or Debian Devel team (responsible for discussion over tech development topics) on Debian mailing list, stating difficulties in deep learning framework Packaging. Zhou re-evaluated the status of TensorFlow’s latest build systems and shared point related to deep learning framework packaging. “My thoughts are concluded from failures instead of success. That said, they should be helpful to future maintainers who'd like to maintain similar packages”, writes Zhou. Zhou elaborates on three obstacles faced by maintainers in Debian's context in case of License, ISA Baseline, and Build System. License Zhou states that although the de facto dominating performance library is cuDNN, no user would prefer using a D-L framework without cuDNN or TPU acceleration. He states that packaging for cuDNN is available under Salsa:nvidia-team, however, the plan to upload it had been aborted since its license looks “too scary”. ISA Baseline Zhou writes that the absence of SIMD code affects critical computational performance. There have been certain helpful suggestions made by other volunteers including ld.so tricks and some gcc features that enables run-time code selection as per the CPU capability. The ld.so tricks help to bloat the resulting .deb packages but it's the most applicable solution. On the other hand, patching a million lines of Tensorflow code that would enable the "function attributes" feature is very difficult and “impossible” to a volunteer. Build System Zhou states that the build systems of TensorFlow and PyTorch are volatile due to the fast pace of development, especially TensorFlow's build system "bazel" is very hard to package for Debian. Also, a good amount of patching work is required to prevent bazel from downloading ~3.0GiB of before building TensorFlow. Additionally, PyTorch's setup.py+cmake+shell build system also requires some patching work. Zhou writes that any future contributor who is about to deal with any deep learning packages to carefully assess the three factors listed above. Apart from that, Zhou has also filed Orphan bugs against tensorflow and several of its dependencies, except src:nsync that contains cmake files. Zhou also mentions that DUPR is the best choice for him in case of .deb packages. For more information, check out the official Debian mailing list. Debian project leader elections goes without nominations. What now? It is supposedly possible to increase reproducibility from 54% to 90% in Debian Buster! Debian 9.7 released with fix for RCE flaw

A team of researchers, namely, Ismail Akrout, Amal Feriani, and Mohamed Akrout, published a paper, titled ‘Hacking Google reCAPTCHA v3 using Reinforcement Learning’, last month. In the paper, researchers present a Reinforcement Learning (RL) method that can easily bypass Google reCAPTCHA v3. Google’s reCAPTCHA system is used for detection of bots from humans and is the most used defense mechanism. It’s used to protect the sites from automated agents and bots, attacks and spams. Google’s reCAPTCHA v3 makes use of machine learning to return a risk assessment score between 0.0 and 1.0. This score is used to characterize the trustability of the user. If a score is close to 1.0 then that means the user is human, if not, then it’s a bot. Method Used The problem has been formulated as a grid world in which the agents can learn the movement of the mouse and click on the reCAPTCHA button to receive a high score. The performance of the agent is studied on varying the cell size of the world. The paper shows that the performance drops when the agent takes big steps toward the goal. Finally, a divide and conquer strategy is used to defeat the reCAPTCHA system for any grid resolution. Researchers have produced a plausible formalization of the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) that can be solved using advanced RL algorithms. Then, a new environment is introduced that simulates the user experience with websites that have reCAPTCHA system enabled. Finally, it is analyzed how RL agents learn or fail to defeat Google reCAPTCHA.   In order to pass the reCAPTCHA test, a human user is required to move the mouse starting from an initial position then perform a sequence of steps until the user reaches the reCAPTCHA check-box and clicks on it. Based on how the interaction goes, the reCAPTCHA system rewards the user with a score.   As shown in the figure, the point where the mouse is the starting point and goal is the position of reCAPTCHA. A grid is constructed where all the pixels between these two points is a possible position for the mouse. It is assumed in the paper that a normal user will not necessarily move the mouse pixel by pixel, hence, cell size is defined that refers to the number of pixels between these two consecutive positions.                                         Agent’s mouse movement After this, a browser page will be opened at each episode with the user mouse at a random position. The agent then takes in a sequence of actions until it reaches the reCAPTCHA or the time limit. Once the episode is complete, the user will receive a feedback of the reCAPTCHA algorithm as any normal human user would. Results Researchers trained a Reinforce agent on a grid world of a specific size. The results presented in the paper are success rates across different 1000 runs. For the experiment to be successful, the agent would have to defeat the reCAPTCHA and obtain a score of 0.9. As per the results of the experiment, the discount factor achieved was 0.99, thereby, successfully defeating the reCAPTCHA. “Our proposed method achieves a success rate of 97.4% on a 100 × 100 grid and 96.7% on a 1000 × 1000 screen resolution”, states the researchers. For more information, check out the official research paper. Google researchers propose building service robots with reinforcement learning to help people with mobility impairment Facebook researchers show random methods without any training can outperform modern sentence embeddings models for sentence classification Researchers release unCaptcha2, a tool that uses Google’s speech-to-text API to bypass the reCAPTCHA audio challenge

It was just last month when Chinese developers protested over the “996 work schedule” on GitHub. The “996” work culture refers to an unofficial work schedule that requires employees to work from 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week, totaling up to 60 hours of work per week. The site, 996icu, that went viral last month, also called out to companies such as Youzan and Jingdong, who both follow the 996 work rule. One such example given was of a Jingdong PR who posted on their maimai ( Chinese business social network) account that “(Our culture is to devote ourselves with all our hearts (to achieve the business objectives)”, defending the 996 work culture. Jack Ma, co-founder and executive chairman of the Alibaba Group, is also among the ones who believe in promoting the 12-hour, 6-day week working schedule. Ma defended the Chinese 996 tech-life on Alibaba’s WeChat account, last week, and chastised people wanting a balanced and typical eight-hour work shift. “In this world, everyone wants success, wants a nice life, wants to be respected. Let me ask everyone if you don't put out more time and energy than others, how can you achieve the success you want?" Compared to them, up to this day, I still feel lucky, I don't regret (working 12 hour days), I would never change this part of me”, states Ma. Other companies to support Ma includes JD.com Inc., whose chief executive, Richard Liu, said that although he wouldn’t force people to work 996, however, people who have slacked off are not his “brothers”, reports Bloomberg. “Many people just want to buy a car and buy a house for Mom and Dad. This is very important, but I think you should have this ideal...some things that you are willing to do can help your child to be more blessed and help you to be blessed. Isn't it a good thing? This requires 996”, states Ma. Jack Ma’s remarks in defense of the 996 work schedule have again ignited uproar among people who strictly disapprove of this extreme over-time work environment in Chinese tech companies. Many have pointed out how promoting “996 work culture” in the name of “devotion” and “hard work” is blatantly ignoring the consequences of such gladiatorial work environment on employees. Unbearable pressure and unrealistic demands from employees often lead to them being depressed, over-fatigued, burned out, and in worst cases, suicidal. For instance, during February 2015, Foxconn forced its employees to work overtime, which resulted in occasional karoshi (death due to job-related exhaustion) and suicide. Public reaction to Jack Ma’s approval of 996 work culture has been largely negative, with people condemning Ma for his utter ignorance towards the issue: https://twitter.com/lindydonna/status/1116870541967683584 https://twitter.com/limeytim/status/1116879825799610368 https://twitter.com/yanni02141/status/1117049673339015168 https://twitter.com/RogerDara/status/1117319069139656704 https://twitter.com/designer_dick/status/1117798646202941441 Chinese tech companies don’t want to hire employees over 30 years of age Alibaba’s Singles Day sale hit record $30 billion in 24 hours Alibaba Cloud released Mars, a tensor-based framework for large-scale data computation

Last month, the European Parliament passed the Copyright Directive that includes Article 11 and Article 13. The directive got 348 votes in favor whereas 274 were against, and 36 declined to vote. Yesterday, the UK, the Republic of Ireland, France and Germany were amongst the 19 nations that agreed to the EU's Copyright Directive. Majority of the EU ministers voted for it and just a few in the likes of  Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Finland, and Sweden opposed it. Considering the majority supporting it, the directive has been passed. According to Article 11 or link tax, news aggregating sites need to obtain a license before linking or using a snippet of news articles. The motive behind this article was to help original content creators gain some revenue from services like Google News and Apple News. Article 13 is for “meme ban” or the “upload filter”. According to Article 13, online content sharing platforms like Vimeo, YouTube, and SoundCloud need to take care of the content they put in order to prevent copyright infringement by their users. This also makes these platforms legally liable for any copyright infringement by their users. Even though the copyright directive was passed in the EU, the legislation still needed to be approved by the Council of Ministers before formal adoption. A majority of 55% of Member States that represent 65% of the population was required to adopt the legislation. In reality, this was achieved with 71.26% votes in favor, and so the Copyright Directive will now pass into law. With both Germany and the UK agreeing to the directive, the Copyright Directive is now adopted. https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/1117679032890478594 EU member states will have two years for implementing the law which will require platforms like YouTube to sign licensing agreements with creators to use their content. If they fail to do so, the infringing content would have to be taken down and shouldn’t be uploaded again to their services. https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/1117713424555835394 European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncke said in a statement that “With the passing of the legislation, Europe is making copyright rules “fit for the digital age.” He further added, “Europe will now have clear rules that guarantee fair remuneration for creators, strong rights for users and responsibility for platforms. When it comes to completing Europe’s digital single market, the copyright reform is the missing piece of the puzzle.” Antonio Tajani, president of European Parliament, and the European Council, Donald Tusk, still needs to sign the directive. As there are still two years for this directive to be implemented, the impact of this action will only be witnessed once the directive officially gets in action. But it seems the big and small scale tech companies will be the ones getting affected. Also, the publishing firms who post content on a regular basis may get affected because of the limitation on using the source link of original content. The actual impact of the law and how it plays out in practice remains yet to be seen. The member states will have two years to transpose the thing into their respective national legislations. Five EU countries oppose the EU copyright directive EU legislators agree to meet this week to finalize on the Copyright Directive EU passes the Copyright Directive with the controversial Article 13 and 11  

Last week, Facebook, in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, announced its annual stockholders' meeting, which will be held on May 30. Going by the proposals listed in the notice looks like the main agenda of this meeting is to make changes to Facebook’s governance structure. The notice lists eight stockholders proposals that Facebook investors will be casting their votes for. One of these proposals is titled as “a stockholder proposal regarding an independent chair,” indicating that the investors will be deciding on whether Mark Zuckerberg should step down as the chairman and be replaced by an independent hire. In recent years, we have witnessed an endless number of scandals in which Facebook played a major part, the main one being the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. These scandals have left the investors, who boast of having nearly $3 million shares of the company, in anger and frustration. They believe that Facebook has been unable to properly address these issues because its current corporate governance structure gives Zuckerberg dual power of both CEO and chairman. Facebook has a dual-class structure, Class A and B. Class B shares have 10 times the voting power of class A shares and not-so-surprisingly Zuckerberg has more than 75% of class B stock. This makes him the holder of more than half of the voting power at Facebook and therefore allows him to dismiss the investor proposals. Last year in July, Trillium Asset Management, which manages about $11 million (£8.4 million) in Facebook stock, wrote a proposal to oust Mark Zuckerberg as chairman of the social-networking giant. "A CEO who also serves as a chair can exert excessive influence on the board and its agenda, weakening the board's oversight of management. Separating the chair and CEO positions reduces this conflict, and an independent chair provides the clearest separation of power between the CEO and the rest of the board," reads the proposal by Trillium Asset Management. Facebook has previously said that splitting Zuckerberg’s role would create "uncertainty, confusion, and inefficiency in board and management function." This time, however, Facebook’s board of directors have called for voting against the stockholders’ proposal. Facebook added, “Our board of directors currently believes that the most effective leadership model is that Mr. Zuckerberg, our founder, and controlling stockholder, serves as both Chairman and CEO.” Their response further says, “We believe our board of directors is functioning effectively under its current structure, and that the current structure provides appropriate oversight protections. We do not believe that requiring the Chair to be independent will provide appreciably better direction and performance, and instead could cause inefficiency in board and management function and relations.” Looking at the previous responses by Facebook on such proposals, chances of Zuckerberg stepping down as chair is very similar. “They have zero chance of succeeding. There's no way in hell that Zuckerberg will voluntarily relinquish his position at the top or his control of so much voting power,” adds a Redditor. Another user adds,  “Won't matter. Zuckerberg has special shares that give him essentially majority votes by himself”. Read the full story at Business Insider. Facebook AI introduces Aroma, a new code recommendation tool for developers Facebook AI open-sources PyTorch-BigGraph for faster embeddings in large graphs Ahead of Indian elections, Facebook removes hundreds of assets spreading fake news and hate speech, but are they too late?

Last week, Open AI’s new algorithm that is trained to play the complex strategy game, Dota 2, beat the world champion e-sports team OG at an event in San Francisco, winning the first two matches of the ‘best-of-three’ series. The competition included a human team of five professional Dota 2 players and AI team of five OpenAI bots. https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1117166996917870592 https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1117276770082775040 Dota 2 is a complex multiplayer strategy game, where two teams of five players each, compete to destroy a large structure that is defended by the opposing team known as the "Ancient", while also defending their own. The game consists of over 100 unique characters, deep skill trees, etc. The five Open AI bots had been trained using deep reinforcement learning techniques and had played 45000 years worth of Dota 2 gameplay in a span of 10 months. OpenAI constantly kept improving by playing itself in a virtual environment. During Dota 2, each team had to pick out of 17 heroes. In the first match, OpenAI used different aggressive tactics and human players managed to survive for more than 40 minutes. One such tactic used by the OpenAI bots involved spending the earned in-game currency to revive heroes upon death, during the start of the match. In the case of the second match, OpenAI’s performance got even better and gained an early edge against OG. Overall, it took less than 20 minutes for the AI to win against humans. The last round was won by the humans. This was the last planned public demonstration of OpenAI's bot, however, Open AI’s research team is now working on new software that allows humans to collaborate alongside the OpenAI Five software in real time. This will allow the team to learn from its unique strategies and patterns. OpenAI is also planning to release a platform, called Arena, that would allow the public to play against OpenAI Five. The platform will be open for three days from April 18th at 9 PM Eastern time. However, this collaboration may not be made available to the public. Apart from that Sam Altman, Co-founder, and CEO, OpenAI, is focussing on a different area of research, which involves making the AI adapt to work in less perfect simulators. Also, OpenAI is working on using reinforcement learning to provide robotic hands more human-like movement, reports the Verge. “What OpenAI is trying to do is build general artificial intelligence and to share those benefits with the world and make sure it’s safe. We’re not here to beat video games, as fun as that is. We’re here to uncover secrets along the path the AGI”, said Altman. Public reaction to the news is largely positive with people congratulating OpenAI for the win: https://twitter.com/LGDgaming/status/1117417389275086848 https://twitter.com/jackgrove2/status/1117211879485603842 https://twitter.com/felipempleite_/status/1117167661396430848 https://twitter.com/zittrain/status/1117205960152502272 OpenAI LP, a new “capped-profit” company to accelerate AGI research and attract top AI talent OpenAI introduces Neural MMO, a multiagent game environment for reinforcement learning agents OpenA’s new versatile AI model, GPT-2 can efficiently write convincing fake news from just a few words

Back in January, a group of Amazon shareholders put forward a proposition to ban the sale of the company’s facial recognition software, Rekognition, to government agencies around the world. For months the company has fought the proposal, using rules set by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to avoid the vote. But with the SEC ruling against the company and in favor of its shareholders just a few weeks ago (on March 28 and April 3), the tech giant was, for once at least, fighting a losing battle. Now, the company is finally facing up to the reality of its position. Last week it confirmed the vote will take place at the annual shareholder meeting on May 22. Why do shareholders want to stop the company from selling Rekognition? It might seem strange that shareholders would want to reduce a company’s ability to sell more products. But Rekognition is no normal product and has faced scrutiny for months from a number of different quarters. Earlier this month, a group of prominent industry and academic AI researchers urged Amazon in an open letter to stop selling its facial recognition technology, Rekognition, to law enforcement agencies. The researchers argued that repeated studies and scrutiny have shown that Rekognition has higher error rates for people of color and women. The sale of Rekognition to governments until Amazon could prove that “the technology does not cause or contribute to actual or potential violations of civil and human rights.” There’s a good deal of data backing up the AI researchers’ position. In 2018 an ACLU study did an experiment in which Rekognition falsely matched 28 members of Congress to mugshot photos, while earlier this year an MIT Media Lab study showed that Rekognition struggled when trying to correctly identify women of color. In response to this research, Amazon has gone on record asserting that researchers weren’t using Rekognition properly. However, that doesn’t really solve the issue: police say they don’t use Rekognition in the way Amazon claims it recommends, either. It’s important to note that shareholders are not unwavering in their opposition to Rekognition. Instead they have called for “an evaluation using independent evidence” to ensure “the technology does not cause or contribute to actual or potential violations of civil and human rights.” Essentially, the shareholders’ position is one about guaranteeing that the company is making the right level of checks and balances when developing a product that has the potential to be so transformative. What does the Amazon leadership say? Amazon’s Board of Directors opposes the proposal. The Board cites the fact that Rekognition has never received any complaints about the product in relation to privacy or human rights from any of its customers. The Amazon Board wants to block third parties from studying Rekognition In addition to the proposal to ban the sale of facial recognition tech to government agencies around the world, shareholders will also vote on another proposal to have a third party study the privacy and human rights implications of Amazon’s Rekognition. The Amazon Board opposes that proposal too. It argues that their commitment to privacy and human rights is enough, outlined in the company’s Terms of Service. This has been the company’s position for the last year whenever it has been met with criticism. Amazon’s perspective isn’t one that’s shared across the tech world. Last year, Microsoft’s president and Chief Legal Officer, Brad Smith, argued for for the federal regulation of face recognition: “We live in a nation of laws, and the government needs to play an important role in regulating facial recognition technology,” Smith wrote. “As a general principle, it seems more sensible to ask an elected government to regulate companies than to ask unelected companies to regulate such a government.” Over 30 AI experts join shareholders in calling on Amazon to stop selling Rekognition, its facial recognition tech, for government surveillance Amazon Rekognition faces more scrutiny from Democrats and German antitrust probe AWS updates the face detection, analysis and recognition capabilities in Amazon Rekognition  

A global debate regarding the sale of facial recognition tech to the government has been ongoing for quite some time now. It is largely over the concern that government tracking public’s every move will hamper public privacy and develop a constant fear of being watched among the citizens. It will also provide the government an unfair ability to target immigrants, religious minorities, people of color & ethnicity. Giant tech firms such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have already gone under the scanner due to the opposition faced by rights groups and public rights organizations. These groups have been urging tech companies to reconsider the consequences that can emerge after selling the facial recognition tech to the government. Although it still remains a debate between the U.S. tech firms, government, and the citizens, it appears to be set in action across China. China apparently is using facial recognition tech to keep a track on around 11 million Uighurs, a Muslim minority, for the purposes of ‘search and review’. China has already been chastised globally for detaining nearly one million members of these Muslim ethnic minorities in indoctrination camps in its western region Xinjiang. Paul Mozur, Asia tech correspondent with the New York Times, published an article, shedding light on the harsh reality of this privacy-hampering practice. It’s the first known example of facial recognition being used intentionally by a government to racially profile and a massive ethical leap for A.I”, writes Mozur. https://twitter.com/paulmozur/status/1117468889007435777 The facial recognition tech looks out for Uighurs on the basis of their appearance and keeps a tab on their day to day activities. This practice which was earlier only ongoing in the west Xinjiang (home for Uighurs), to track people’s DNA, is now being implemented in other parts of China. Earlier this year, law enforcement in the central Chinese city of Sanmenxia had a facial recognition system that tracked whether its residents were Uighurs or not about 500,000 times in a month. Also, law enforcement at the central province of Shaanxi aimed to acquire a smart camera system in 2018 that would identify Uighur/non-Uighur attributes. Generally, facial recognition tech tracks people on the basis of skin color and face shapes. However, China’s facial surveillance, with the help of tech startups, have managed to classify people based on ‘social definition’ of race or ethnicity with the new ‘minority recognition’ feature. Chinese AI companies to aid with the software include Yitu, Megvii, SenseTime, and CloudWalk. With the help of machine learning, engineers feed thousands of labeled images of Uighurs and non-Uighurs to train the systems to recognize the pattern, which in turn, helps distinguish between different ethnic groups. Claire Garvie, an associate at center on privacy and tech at Georgetown Law, told New York Times, “If you make a technology that can classify people by ethnicity, someone will use it to repress that ethnicity.” Additionally, a face-image database has been set up for people with criminal records, mental illnesses, history of drug abuse, and those who have petitioned the government over grievances. A national database of criminals includes about 300,000 faces, and people with a history of drug use totals 8,000 faces, in the city of Wenzhou. Just last month, an analyst at Tencent & WeChat, Matthew Brennan, tweeted a video of a facial recognition kiosk at Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport in the People’s Republic of China that went viral. The video showed kiosk giving Brennan personalized flight information after scanning his face within a fraction of seconds. According to Jonathan Frankle, an A.I. researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this practice by China is a major threat to its democracy and an ‘urgent crisis’. Critics have labeled China negatively for its gladiatorial show of tech-enabled authoritarianism and power over Uighurs. https://twitter.com/DrProsper_/status/1117704098986565632 https://twitter.com/DrProsper_/status/1117704098986565632 Alarming ways governments are using surveillance tech to watch you Chinese tech companies don’t want to hire employees over 30 years of age ‘Developers’ lives matter’: Chinese developers protest over the “996 work schedule” on GitHub

Facebook and it's family of apps Whatsapp, Messenger, and Instagram were hit by another major outage yesterday. This is their second outage within a month.  According to downdetector.com, issues started at 6:30 AM ET, leaving users unable to load fresh content on Instagram and Facebook or message each other via Whatsapp and Messenger. The issue was resolved at 9 AM ET the same day and Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were all up and running. https://twitter.com/bansaldinesh23/status/1117674796152545280 Thousands of Facebook (and it's other platform) users took to Twitter to share their issues creating memes about the outage. https://twitter.com/brfootball/status/1117389780915040256 https://twitter.com/9GAG/status/1117383821962272769 https://twitter.com/habet01/status/1117486075319132161 Twitter saves the day! https://twitter.com/asal_kc/status/1117439995411877890 https://twitter.com/Ace55061783/status/1117425187895435264 https://twitter.com/felizkrennews/status/1117427741127782406 Some also tweeted about how these platforms are controlling us to the extent that even a small break is unbearable. https://twitter.com/zamirmohyedin/status/1117682923342196736 Others used this opportunity to market their own products. https://twitter.com/NEstimator/status/1117434348981166085 Facebook has not tweeted about the outage on its Twitter page or its developer site. However, in a statement to Verge, a Facebook spokesperson said, “Earlier today, some people may have experienced trouble connecting to the family of apps. The issue has since been resolved; we’re sorry for any inconvenience.” As per the Facebook nature, it slyly refused to shared details on what caused the blackout. Just last month the Facebook family of apps were hit with a 14-hour long outage, the longest in its history. The blackout caused a bigger hit to the revenue of advertisers on Facebook that spend large amounts of money to reach potential customers on Facebook platforms. It wasn’t until over 24 hours later that Facebook finally apologized for the blackouts on Twitter blaming a server configuration change for the mishap. Facebook family of apps hits 14 hours blackout, longest in its history Facebook tweet explains ‘server config change’ for 14-hour outage on all its platforms Outage plagues Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp ahead of Black Friday Sale, throwing users and businesses into panic.

It was just a little over a week ago when Google released its diversity annual report for the year 2019. And last thursday, its chief diversity officer, Danielle Brown, who co-wrote the report with Melonie Parker, announced that she is leaving Google to join Gusto, a leading Denver and San Francisco based HR-tech firm. “I’m joining the team at Gusto...that’s on a mission to create a world where work empowers a better life. I’ll be leading the People team at a company that is all about people”, writes Brown in a LinkedIn post. https://twitter.com/dmbrown1/status/1116361389201739776 Brown is being replaced by Melonie Parker, who earlier served as the Global director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Google. Brown had joined Google as the Chief Diversity Officer back in June 2017 and earlier worked at a similar profile at Intel. “Danielle has dedicated her career to helping foster humanity at work. Most recently, she served as vice president, employee engagement and chief diversity and inclusion officer at Google, where she focused on ensuring their workplace and culture were respectful, safe, and inclusive — values we hold paramount at Gusto. Danielle will be an incredible addition to the Gusto team”, said Josh Reeves, co-founder, and CEO, Gusto.   https://twitter.com/GustoHQ/status/1116360860492894210 Gusto serves 6 million small businesses all over the U.S. and provides small businesses with a full-service people platform. The platform provides business owners with all the features they need to build their team.   Eileen Naughton, Google VP of People Operations, confirmed Brown’s departure and told TechCrunch that she’s “grateful to Danielle for her excellent work over the past two years to improve representation in Google’s workforce and ensure an inclusive culture for everyone. We wish her all the best in her new role at Gusto”. https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1116567286372913152 Liz Fong Jones, a former Google Engineer, who left Google earlier this year in February, tweeted in response to the news of Brown’s departure, saying that it’s not a good sign for Google. She mentioned that Brown wasn't “always popular with execs and employees” but was a  “straight shooter”. https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1116361831742881793 https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1116362110743863298 Jones at her departure cited Google’s lack of leadership in response to the demands made by employees during the Google walkout in November 2018. She had also published a post on Medium, stating, ‘grave concerns’ related to strategic decisions made at Google and the way it ‘misused its power’. Brown hasn’t specified a reason for her departure from Google but wrote on her Linkedin post that “What if, in addition to trying to solve for employee engagement and inclusion within the biggest tech companies in the world, we tried to solve those critical needs for every local storefront, every new startup just getting off the ground, or every doctor’s office across our communities?” Google is facing a lot of controversies over its employee treatment and work culture. Just last week,  over 900 Google workers signed a letter urging Google for fair rights for its contract workers, who make up nearly 54% of the workforce. Google in response rolled out mandatory benefits for its TVCs including health care, paid sick leaves, tuition reimbursement, and minimum wage among others. Brown hasn’t spoken out yet anything regarding her experience within Google and writes that she’s “thrilled to join Gusto and advance its mission. I look forward to a future where work empowers a better life for all small businesses and their teams” Audience reaction to the news is largely positive with people congratulating Brown on her new role at Gusto. https://twitter.com/Katrina_HRM/status/1116522924578525184 https://twitter.com/nataliaenvy/status/1116391017458966528 Ian Goodfellow quits Google and joins Apple as a director of machine learning Google employees filed petition to remove anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant Kay Coles James from the AI Council Is Google trying to ethics-wash its decisions with its new Advanced Tech External Advisory Council?

PagerDuty, a cloud computing firm, had its shares jump 59% in its opening day of trading at the New York Stock Exchange, yesterday after the firm priced its first software IPO of 2019 above an elevated range. https://twitter.com/jenntejada/status/1116108997189406723 https://twitter.com/superlilia/status/1116337381559267329 PagerDuty had initially targeted a price of $19 to $21 for its IPO shares. However, PagerDuty’s shares traded $38.25 a piece, giving the company a market capitalization of around $2.8 billion.   Its stock was priced at $24 a piece, late Tuesday this week with a market cap of nearly $1.8 billion. PagerDuty had plans of selling 8.5 million shares in the IPO, but the stockholders offered about 570,000 shares. PagerDuty operates an On-Call Management platform. The company helps improve the engagement between software developers and operators as it enables them to take action in real time. It is used by developers, IT, security, and customer support domains across different companies.   The company was incorporated in 2010 and has its headquarters in San Francisco, California and its competitors include Atlassian Corp, OpsGenie, and Splunk. PagerDuty’s first financing round took place in September last year, where it was valued at $1.3 billion in a private funding round led by T. Rowe Price and Wellington Management. PagerDuty is used by over 11000 companies, extending across 350,000 employees, including Box and Slack. Its revenue hiked 48% last year, reaching $117.8 million. However, the company’s overall loss had reached $40.7 million from $38.1 million last year. Jennifer Tejada, CEO, PagerDuty, told TechCrunch about the IPO that “it is a gratifying day, especially for the co-founders who were pulling the idea together for PagerDuty...before they even launched it, and for employees who’ve been with the company for nearly as long and...turned down safer and higher-paying jobs along the way”. Tejada owns a 5.7% stake in the company and says that PagerDuty is going to serve a $25 billion market made up of about 22 million software developers.   Public reaction to the news is positive, with people congratulating PagerDuty for the win: https://twitter.com/ethankurz/status/1116340622091272194 https://twitter.com/sacca/status/1116129693617442816 https://twitter.com/alexrkonrad/status/1116351697339723779 https://twitter.com/stewart/status/1116252660905021440 Amazon stocks surge past $2000, expect Amazon to join Apple in the $1 trillion market cap Apple stocks soar just shy of $1 Trillion market cap as revenue hits $53.3 Billion in Q3 earnings 2018 Why Wall Street unfriended Facebook: Stocks fell $120 billion in market value after Q2 2018 earnings call

Yesterday, US senators Ron Wyden, Cory Booker, and Yvette D. Clarke proposed a bill named “Algorithmic Accountability Act”. This bill calls for large companies to assess and fix their algorithms if they show any type of unfairness, inaccuracy, or bias. https://twitter.com/RepYvetteClarke/status/1116065054317740032 While automated decision systems are being used to make some of the most important decisions for us, in some use cases they fail to give the right result because of algorithmic bias. The machine learning algorithms behind these systems are often trained using data that has an underrepresentation of a particular race or sex, which leads to their racist, sexist and non-inclusive behavior. Sen. Ron Wyden said in an interview with The Associated Press, “Computers are increasingly involved in the most important decisions affecting Americans’ lives — whether or not someone can buy a home, get a job or even go to jail. But instead of eliminating bias, too often these algorithms depend on biased assumptions or data that can actually reinforce discrimination against women and people of color.” This bill comes at a time when we are witnessing several controversies surrounding AI systems. The list of such controversies just goes on and usually includes the big tech. For instance, Facebook facing a charge of housing discrimination by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Amazon shutting down its automated recruitment tool after it was found favoring men in industries where they already dominate. Earlier, we have seen facial recognition systems misidentifying black women. Computerized money lending tools often charge higher interest rates to Latino and black borrowers. What is Algorithmic Accountability Act? This 15-page bill lists all the “impact assessments” companies are required to perform on their automated decision systems. These assessments will include evaluating the development process, system design, and training data for their accuracy, fairness, bias, discrimination, privacy, and security. Companies will be required to evaluate a broad range of algorithms, including the systems that attempt to predict and analyze customer’s behavior, involve large amounts of sensitive data, or systematically monitors a large, publicly accessible physical place. If the assessment report shows any risks of discrimination, privacy problem, or other issues, companies will need to address them within a timely manner. The act targets companies who make over $50 million per year and has access to personal information of at least 1 million customers or devices. It will also be applicable to “data brokers” who, as a major part of their business, collect, assemble, or maintain personal information of individuals. Once passed, the bill would let the Federal Trade Commission to create rules for companies to check for the concerns in their automated systems and correct them if any problems are found. It also gives FTC the authority to regularly monitor how these automated systems are performing. Many Twitter users welcomed this much-needed move to fight against tech bias: https://twitter.com/fhuszar/status/1116253141895450624 https://twitter.com/Kweku_OA/status/1116043963503267840 You can read the proposed bill here: Algorithmic Accountability Act. Facebook will ban white nationalism, and separatism content in addition to white supremacy content Facebook takes an initiative against discriminative ads on its platform The FTC issues orders to 7 broadband companies to analyze ISP privacy practices given they are also ad-support content platforms  

It was just two weeks back when Chinese developers protested over the “996 work schedule”, that requires employees to work from 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week in China. And now the news of Chinese tech firms firing employees over the age of 30 is trending. Shelly Banjo, Roving Asia Tech Reporter, at Bloomberg published a post in May last year where she shed light on the grotesque reality of the ageism work culture in China. One such example is of Helen He, a tech recruiter in Shanghai, who has been instructed by her bosses to not hire people over 35 years of age. “Most people in their 30s are married and have to take care of their family—they’re not able to focus on the high-intensity work. If a 35-year-old candidate isn’t seeking to be a manager, a hiring company wouldn’t even give that CV a glance”, said Helen. Ageism within tech firms is at its peak in China and is taking a toll over its employees, as they are forced to move out of the industry. Banjo states that the “30+ middle-age crisis”,  is rife in China. For instance, close to three-quarters of tech workers in China are below thirty in age and the employers further promote this concept. The core reason behind Chinese employers fortifying this practice is because employees over thirty years of age are not considered as efficient as the young. Apart from that, anybody over 30 years old is likely to be experienced and demand a higher wage. Whereas, young employees can be hired at lower wages (as most don’t have a family to look after), contributing to higher profits on the lower scale for the company. Banjo states that China’s 996 work schedule and its hiring young policies reflect China’s obsession with achieving global tech domination. However, the consequences of this obsession are hard-hitting. Banjo gives an example of Ou Jianxin, a 42-year-old, research engineer at ZTE Corp. who committed suicide after he was fired from his role without informing him of the reason. However, after the news went public, people had their suspicions and many blamed it on his age, saying that, he would have already been considered “too old” to be an engineer in China. Another example presented by Banjo is of a job search results on Zhaopin.com that over 10,000 job postings calling for applicants younger than 35. One such job posting is from e-commerce retailer JD.com Inc, which seeks an applicant with a master’s degree for a senior manager position between the age of 20-28. Moreover, although China has national laws that prohibit discrimination based on gender, religion, and disability, there are no laws based on declining someone an offer based on his/her age. “Age-dismissal victims rarely ask for help from lawyers,” says Lu Jun, a social activist and visiting scholar at Fordham University School of Law. But there are some who have fought against the ageism policy. For instance, in 2011 the Shenzhen Stock Exchange had put up a recruitment notice on its website asking for applicants younger than 28. But, the director of a local nonprofit wrote an open letter about this listing to the municipal bureau of human resources, after which the media made the story viral, leading to stock exchange investigating into the listing and taking it down. Others have a different way to fight ageism. One such example presented is of Liu Huai Yi, 33, who was fired from his IT role at Nokia Corp. in Chengdu. Liu says the incident pushed him “to change and improve.. skills to get a better job. I don’t buy the idea that after 35 you can’t get a job. Someone in IT has to just keep learning to keep up.” After a long job search, Liu got another IT job in a multinational healthcare company. However, the ageist policies are not just a part of China’s work culture but have also spread to other parts of the world. For instance, in March 2018, ProPublica conducted an investigation that showed that IBM cut 20,000 older employees in the U.S. over a course of last five years to “sharply increase hiring of people born after 1980.” A user named “duxup” on Hacker News commented, “A little bit like the US maybe? I was already in a technical field, was laid off after a company buyout, I changed careers and took a coding Bootcamp. The other two older guys (at Bootcamp) and I got a lot of "culture" related questions. One dude was actually told by the recruiter that they were worried he was too old, he was surprised they'd actually say it to him so he asked ... and the recruiter repeated herself happily”. Another user “jdietrich” commented on Hacker News, “Older workers expect higher wages and are less willing to tolerate unpaid overtime. They're harder to bullshit with cheap "perks" like foosball tables and beer on Friday. An experienced developer might be better, but who cares when you can get two junior devs for the same price and they'll work 14 hour days during your quarterly "crunch"? They don't believe in the 10x developer, they don't even believe in the 1.1x developer; their employees are just meat in a seat”. What the US-China tech and AI arms race means for the world – Frederick Kempe at Davos 2019 China’s Huawei technologies accused of stealing Apple’s trade secrets, reports The Information Is China’s facial recognition powered airport kiosks an attempt to invade privacy via an easy flight experience