Hacking Politics with Sensitive AIs

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Mac malware is really here, 5 calls you can make to engage in politics, Heat Pumps are Better, tech companies attack travel ban, Tech Forward, Easter Island history lesson, Socially Sensitive AI, and more geek news.

Not Just Windows: Hackers Are Using Mac Malware to Track Iranian Activists

Apart from the malware itself, a danger to activists is that they may assume they are safer using macOS, and be less vigilant when hackers try to attack them.

5 Calls debuts what may be the easiest way to call your reps yet

As more tools become available, the more likely they’ll be adopted by today’s armchair activists, whose political activism pre-election may have been limited to Facebook likes and retweets.

6 Sites that has sprung up as a result of the election

Followup Heat Pumps Are Better

A heat pump is a device that transfers heat energy from a source of heat to a destination called a “heat sink”. Heat pumps are designed to move thermal energy in the opposite direction of spontaneous heat flow by absorbing heat from a cold space and releasing it to a warmer one. A heat pump uses a small amount of external power to accomplish the work of transferring energy from the heat source to the heat sink.

Tech Forward

Tech organizations & tools working for social progress.

New evidence: Easter Island civilization was not destroyed by war

Still, there was one piece of evidence that remained pretty alarming. The island is strewn with sharpened pieces of obsidian, called mata’a, which look alarmingly like spearheads. When Captain Cook came to the island in 1774, members of his expedition reported that the Rapa Nui “had lances or spears made of thin, ill-shaped sticks, and pointed with a sharp triangular piece of black glassy lava.” Given the superabundance of these “spears” all across the island, it seems obvious that a lot of murdering was going on.

Socially Sensitive AI Software Coaches Call-Center Workers

Call centers have long sought to analyze customers’ voices for signs of agitation or frustration. Software is getting much better at analyzing social interactions and emotions thanks to clever new machine-learning techniques and copious amounts of training data.

The Real Threat Is Machine Incompetence, Not Intelligence

He goes on to argue that AI will continue to develop in siloed form, where new and impressive machines continue to scare doomsayers for their abilities within relatively narrow task domains while remaining “incredibly dumb” when it comes to everything else.

Developers Able to Respond to Customer Reviews in iOS 10.3 and macOS Sierra 10.12.4

Going forward, developers will be able to respond to customer reviews on the App Store “in a way that is available for all customers to see.” This will allow developers to address negative reviews for the first time ever

The New UI for rating apps

The Coding Train - with Daniel Shiffman - YouTube

In this YouTube channel I publish “creative coding” video tutorials every week. Subjects covered range from the basics of programming languages like JavaScript (with p5.js) and Java (with Processing) to generative algorithms like physics simulation, computer vision, and data visualization.

I’m Daniel Shiffman. I teach at ITP (http://itp.nyu.edu) and help to administer the Processing Foundation (http://processingfoundation…). Here l I publish “creative coding” video tutorials every week. I also answer questions during live streams!


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