Digital Assistants
Home assistants and voice activated interfaces can be so convenient - but what you may not realize is that in order to do these things, the software is always on and is always listening.
Smart Cities
In order to make cities liveable with so many people, we need to use smart technologies like sensors to help us plan and maintain them.
Australia’s New Encryption Legislation – Major Changes Required
Australia passed its disastrous "Access and Assistance" legislation - a political farce with terrible consequences for society and the technology industry - and I firmly believe that this legislation is attempting the impossible.
AI Ethics
Ask a search engine what the world has to say about AI ethics, and you're guaranteed a plethora of scholarly articles, blog posts, magazine features, and images—some animated, illustrating the ‘trolley problem’.
Digital Health, Transparency, Consent and Respect
Transparency and consent are necessary components of ethical data handling, but what about respect? On Monday morning, Australia's Digital Health Agency began defending the security of the Government's MyHealth Record system, but by midday the agency was concerned with more immediate matters: users inundating its online and telephone systems.
The History of Safety Regulation is Written in Blood
We’ve all heard the saying, ‘safety standards are written in blood’, in reference to a reactive, rather than proactive approach to safety regulations. So, why is the world so determined to see the same fix-as-we-go attitude towards the safety standards of self-driving cars?
Government Use of Citizen Information
We’re already at risk of having our personal information used against us, while the collection and cross-indexing of our data expands year-on-year. We need to elevate privacy and data protection to the political sphere and keep it there.Since 2018 began, the IT industry has watched, in horror, the slow-motion train wreck of Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities. Why? Because these are hardware bugs and they’re harder to deal with than a slip in a C++ library. What does this mean for driverless cars?
Autonomous Vehicles
Driverless vehicles remain one of the tech industry's favourite futuristic scenarios, fuelling a daily run of announcements, partnerships and promises.Since 2018 began, the IT industry has watched, in horror, the slow-motion train wreck of Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities. Why? Because these are hardware bugs and they’re harder to deal with than a slip in a C++ library. What does this mean for driverless cars?
Why does tech keep circling back to ‘the sleaze’?
It almost reads like a choose-your-own-adventure. You can choose between a future in which robots are pole dancers for men to ogle, or a future where sexbots are hacked to kill their owners.
Put away the fake glasses
The most current and familiar examples of adversarial AI are attacks on vision systems. These systems are becoming more pervasive—facial recognition unlocks computers or phones, opens doors, and is a key tool of the surveillance state. It’s no surprise there's a lot of work going on to attack the models.