Your data privacy is slipping away – here’s why, and what you can do about it

  Cybersecurity and data privacy are constantly in the news. Governments are passing new cybersecurity laws. Companies are investing in cybersecurity controls such as firewalls, encryption, and awareness training at record levels.

  And yet, people are losing ground on data privacy.

  In 2024, the Identity Theft Resource Center reported that companies sent out 1.3 billion notifications to the victims of data breaches. That’s more than triple the notices sent out the year before. It’s clear that despite growing efforts, personal data breaches are not only continuing, but accelerating.

China leans into using AI − even as the US leads in developing it

  In the competitive arena of global technology, China’s ambitions in artificial intelligence stand out – not just for their scale but for their distinct strategic approach.

  In 2017, the Chinese Communist Party declared its intent to surpass the United States to become the world leader in AI by 2030. This plan, however, is less about pioneering novel technologies and more about strategically adapting existing ones to serve state economic, political, and social objectives.

ChatGPT turns 1: AI chatbot’s success says as much about humans as technology

  ChatGPT was launched on Nov. 30, 2022, ushering in what many have called artificial intelligence’s breakout year. Within days of its release, ChatGPT went viral. Screenshots of conversations snowballed across social media, and the use of ChatGPT skyrocketed to an extent that seems to have surprised even its maker, OpenAI. By January, ChatGPT was seeing 13 million unique visitors each day, setting a record for the fastest-growing user base of a consumer application.

  Throughout this breakout year, ChatGPT has revealed the power of a good interface and the perils of hype, and it has sown the seeds of a new set of human behaviors. As a researcher who studies technology and human information behavior, I find that ChatGPT’s influence in society comes as much from how people view and use it as the technology itself.

Why humans can’t trust AI: You don’t know how it works, what it’s going to do or whether it’ll serve your interests

  There are alien minds among us. Not the little green men of science fiction, but the alien minds that power the facial recognition in your smartphone, determine your creditworthiness, and write poetry and computer code. These alien minds are artificial intelligence systems, the ghost in the machine that you encounter daily.

  But AI systems have a significant limitation: Many of their inner workings are impenetrable, making them fundamentally unexplainable and unpredictable. Furthermore, constructing AI systems that behave in ways that people expect is a significant challenge.

AI is an existential threat – just not the way you think

  The rise of ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence systems has been accompanied by a sharp increase in anxiety about AI. For the past few months, executives and AI safety researchers have been offering predictions, dubbed “P(doom),” about the probability that AI will bring about a large-scale catastrophe.

Blockchain is a key technology – a computer scientist explains why the post-crypto-crash future is bright

  People hear a lot about blockchain technology in relation to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, which rely on blockchain systems to keep records of financial transactions between people and businesses. But a crash in public trust in cryptocurrencies like TerraUSD – and, therefore, a massive drop in their market value – doesn’t mean their underlying technology is also worthless.

  In fact, there are plenty of other uses for this type of system, which does not rely on centralized storage and where many people can participate securely, even if they don’t all know each other.

Gen Z goes retro: Why the younger generation is ditching smartphones for ‘dumb phones’

  There is a growing movement among Gen Z to do away with smartphones and revert back to “less smart” phones like old-school flip and slide phones. Flip phones were popular in the mid-1990s and 2000s but now seem to be making a comeback among younger people.

  While this may seem like a counter-intuitive trend in our technology-reliant society, a Reddit forum dedicated to “dumb phones” is steadily gaining in popularity. According to a CNBC new report, flip phones sales are on the rise in the U.S.

ChatGPT-powered Wall Street: The benefits and perils of using artificial intelligence to trade stocks and other financial instruments

  Artificial Intelligence-powered tools, such as ChatGPT, have the potential to revolutionize the efficiency, effectiveness, and speed of the work humans do.

  And this is true in financial markets as much as in sectors like health care, manufacturing, and pretty much every other aspect of our lives.

Generative AI is forcing people to rethink what it means to be authentic

  It turns out that pop stars Drake and The Weeknd didn’t suddenly drop a new track that went viral on TikTok and YouTube in April 2023. The photograph that won an international photography competition that same month wasn’t a real photograph. And the image of Pope Francis sporting a Balenciaga jacket that appeared in March 2023? That was also a fake.

  All were made with the help of generative AI, the new technology that can generate humanlike text, audio, and images on demand through programs such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Bard, among others.

What are passkeys? A cybersecurity researcher explains how you can use your phone to make passwords a thing of the past

  Passwords could soon become passé.

  Effective passwords are cumbersome, all the more so when reinforced by two-factor authentication. But the need for authentication and secure access to websites is as great as ever. Enter passkeys.

AI isn’t close to becoming sentient – the real danger lies in how easily we’re prone to anthropomorphize it

  ChatGPT and similar large language models can produce compelling, humanlike answers to an endless array of questions – from queries about the best Italian restaurant in town to explaining competing theories about the nature of evil.

  The technology’s uncanny writing ability has surfaced some old questions – until recently relegated to the realm of science fiction – about the possibility of machines becoming conscious, self-aware, or sentient.

Signatures of alien technology could be how humanity first finds extraterrestrial life

  If an alien were to look at Earth, many human technologies – from cell towers to fluorescent light bulbs – could be a beacon signifying the presence of life.

  We are two astronomers who work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – or SETI. In our research, we try to characterize and detect signs of technology originating from beyond Earth. These are called technosignatures. While scanning the sky for a TV broadcast of some extraterrestrial Olympics may sound straightforward, searching for signs of distant, advanced civilizations is a much more nuanced and difficult task than it might seem.

How QR codes work and what makes them dangerous – a computer scientist explains

  Among the many changes brought about by the pandemic is the widespread use of QR codes, graphical representations of digital data that can be printed and later scanned by a smartphone or other device.

  QR codes have a wide range of uses that help people avoid contact with objects and close interactions with other people, including for sharing restaurant menus, email list sign-ups, car and home sales information, and checking in and out of medical and professional appointments.

Smart devices spy on you – 2 computer scientists explain how the Internet of Things can violate your privacy

  Have you ever felt a creeping sensation that someone’s watching you? Then you turn around and you don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Depending on where you were, though, you might not have been completely imagining it. There are billions of things sensing you every day. They are everywhere, hidden in plain sight – inside your TV, fridge, car, and office. These things know more about you than you might imagine, and many of them communicate that information over the internet.

The metaverse is money and crypto is king – why you’ll be on a blockchain when you’re virtual-world hopping

  You may think the metaverse will be a bunch of interconnected virtual spaces – the world wide web but accessed through virtual reality. This is largely correct, but there is also a fundamental but slightly more cryptic side to the metaverse that will set it apart from today’s internet: the blockchain.

  In the beginning, Web 1.0 was the information superhighway of connected computers and servers that you could search, explore and inhabit, usually through a centralized company’s platform – for example, AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google. Around the turn of the millennium, Web 2.0 came to be characterized by social networking sites, blogging, and the monetization of user data for advertising by the centralized gatekeepers to “free” social media platforms, including Facebook, SnapChat, Twitter, and TikTok.

What is 5G? An electrical engineer explains

  5G stands for fifth-generation cellular network technology.

  It’s the technology that enables wireless communication – for example, from your cellular phone to a cell tower, which channels it to the internet. 5G is a network service provided by telecommunications carriers and is not the same thing as the 5 GHz band on your Wi-Fi router.

What the pandemic can teach us about vulnerabilities in our defense supply chain

  You only have to go back to March 2020, when grocery store shelves were stripped bare and toilet paper became a scarce commodity, to understand how vulnerable people are when supply doesn’t meet demand. Unfortunately, the U.S. military can easily be put in the same position.

  America’s defense supply chain—that is, the large network of manufacturers who produce our weapons platforms and equipment—is neither reliable nor secure. Defense production is vital in maintaining a strong national defense, and such fragility in our supply chains is an enormous liability. It directly hinders our ability to win the next war.

Screens are keeping us connected now – but they’re still disruptive to in-person communication

  Digital technology has been a lifeline during the COVID-19 health crisis. Yet, its impact on human relationships remains complex. It allows for work and connection in many domains but does so in ways that are often intrusive, exhausting, and potentially corrosive to face-to-face relationships.

  The debate about technology’s effect on overall mental health rages on. Some researchers claim smartphones have destroyed a generation, while others argue screen time doesn’t predict mental health at all.

  After years of research on the topic, I have come to the conclusion that screen time can disrupt a fundamental aspect of our human experience – paying attention to one another’s eyes.

Why Americans are staying put, instead of moving to a new city or state

  The story of America is one of moving.

  A total of 13.6% of Americans today were born in another country, and most of us are descended from immigrants. This story of migration also includes moving within the country. Over the last 200 years, Americans have settled the frontier, moved away from cities toward suburbs, and migrated away from cities in the Northeast toward the South and West.

  This narrative that Americans are constantly moving within the country is no longer true.

Congress should revive the Office of Technology Assessment

  In recent decades, the U.S. economy and society have been propelled forward by a boom in science and technology innovation—but the legislative branch has failed to keep pace with the resultant shifts in policy concerns. American life is rife with newly entrenched science and technologies that have been met with concern and confusion—from the genetic modification of food to personal data privacy on social media. Additionally, the emergence of highly technical concerns such as climate change, cybersecurity, and new energy technologies have had considerable domestic and geopolitical implications and require unprecedented levels of interdisciplinary analysis.