How to confuse Google’s ad network

This avocado armchair could be the future of AI 

Sponsored by Quantic The Download Your daily dose of what's up in emerging technology Bamboozling Google 01.06.21 Good morning! Today: a browser extension that helps you fight back against Google surveillance, and the future of AI could be... an avocado armchair (just hear us out.) Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day. How to confuse Google’s ad network   This story is by Lee McGuigan, an assistant professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Google has an enormous amount of data about its users, and it uses that data to make an unimaginable amount of money from advertising: over $120 billion a year. But it has major social costs. It erodes privacy, perpetuates forms of discrimination, and siphons money away from the public-interest journalism that democracies need to survive. Some activists, frustrated by the inability of regulators to effectively constrain Google’s actions, have taken matters into their own hands. They've created a browser extension called AdNauseam that automatically clicks on web ads to interfere with behavioral tracking and profiling.  AdNauseam is a tool of obfuscation. Obfuscation tactics are a sort of guerrilla warfare approach to the lack of privacy protections. Since it’s not possible to hide from Google’s surveillance, these tactics introduce inaccurate or excessive information to confuse and ultimately sabotage it. AdNauseam is like conventional ad-blocking software, but with an extra layer. Instead of just removing ads when the user browses a website, it also automatically clicks on them. By making it appear as if the user is interested in everything, AdNauseam makes it hard for observers to construct a profile of that person. It’s like jamming radar by flooding it with false signals. And it’s adjustable. Users can choose to trust privacy-respecting advertisers while jamming others. They can also choose whether to automatically click on all the ads on a given website or only some percentage of them. Read the full story. This avocado armchair could be the future of AI   What’s new: OpenAI has built two new models, called DALL·E and CLIP, that combine language and images in a way that will make AIs better at understanding both words and what they refer to. The logic: For all the flair of GPT-3, OpenAI’s language model, it doesn’t know what it’s talking about. By grounding text in images, researchers at OpenAI and elsewhere are trying to give language models a better grasp of the everyday concepts that humans use to make sense of things. How it works: CLIP has learned to recognize images not from labeled examples in curated data sets, as most existing models do, but from images and their captions taken from the internet. It learns what’s in an image from a description rather than a one-word label such as “cat” or “banana.” Instead of recognizing images, DALL·E draws them. This model is a smaller version of GPT-3 that has also been trained on text-image pairs taken from the internet. To test DALL·E’s ability to work with novel concepts, the researchers gave it captions that described objects they thought it would not have seen before, such as “an avocado armchair.” The results are striking, though still a mixed bag. But most AI researchers agree that the overall approach, of grounding language in visual understanding, is a good way to make AIs smarter. Read the full story. —Will Douglas Heaven   Read next: What Buddhism can do for AI ethics. (TR, Opinion) Want to get deeper into what AI is (and isn’t), how it works, and what the future holds for the field? Download readers get a special discount on Future Compute, an event hosted online on February 10-11, all about where computing is going next. Join us! And if you fancy saying Hi, I will be hosting the executive panel session on the Thursday. What more reason do you need to come along (virtually)?! We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet 'em at me.)   + Valerie Sherman is literally and figuratively brightening up everyone’s day in Chicago by “yarn bombing” the streets.    + How to make a decent nonalcoholic cocktail.    + A record-breaking diamond ring. Bit much though, isn’t it.    + If you haven’t tried growing a beard yet, perhaps you might give it a go now. (NYT $)   + This artist does pretty aerial embroidery of the British countryside.   + How computers were advertised, from 1950-1999. Sponsor Message Quantic School of Business and Technology Executive MBA The #ModernMBA is here. Quantic is the world's only accredited, mobile-first graduate school that's educating the next generation of business leaders. Join a global network of entrepreneurial professionals in science, tech, and business — including over 300 managers from Google, Apple, and Amazon. Sign up to apply and sample over 40 complimentary courses at quantic.edu. The application deadline is November 5.  Sign up now. The top ten must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Sorry folks, we’re in for a tough January Optimism for the near year is giving way to a realization that the toughest challenges may lie ahead. (NYT $)   + The virus infected one in 50 people in England in the space of just one week. (NYT $)   + Some Indonesians are worried about whether the vaccine is halal. (Al Jazeera)   + An interview with the wife-and-husband who founded BioNTech and created the world’s first covid-19 vaccine. (Der Spiegel)   + Vaccinations are off to a shaky start in Europe. (NYT $)   + Health officials in the US are considering handing out half doses of the Moderna shot. (CNBC)   + How to stop the next pandemic. (Wired UK)  2 China has denied entry to a WHO team investigating covid-19’s origins The conspiracy crowd will have a field day with this. (BBC)   3 The far-right is agitating for violence online ahead of Biden’s inauguration Inevitably. But their bark is virtually always way worse than their bite. (NBC)   + Trump just banned US transactions with eight Chinese apps. (Reuters)  4 Can we ever fix Facebook? In a word, no. Not while selling ads and driving clicks is its core business model. (New Republic)   + How Facebook brought back a partisan news feed in Georgia. (The Markup)  5 The first pig-to-human organ transplants could happen this year 🐷 This comes with a strong “ick” factor, but it could save lives. (Future Human)   6 This robot dog has learned how to get up again when it falls And it works it out just as we do, by good old fashioned trial and error. (Wired $)   + Hear me out… robots made of ICE that can assemble themselves on other planets. (IEEE Spectrum)  7 Spy satellites are helping us to track climate change Pretty cool. (NYT $)   8 People are trying to use tech to dream more lucidly 💤 There’s no evidence it’s really possible, but that isn’t stopping them. (Wired UK)   + Gadgets probably won’t fix your insomnia. (TR)  9 White noise is big business on Spotify 🎧 People are weird. (OneZero)   10 TikTok teens are getting into enterprise software Hey, if it’s helping them to get a better handle on *waves hands* all this, then fair play. (The Verge) Discover how the next wave of computing technologies will change your business. Join us this February for Future Compute, our virtual conference on intelligent computing. We'll explore the building blocks of computing and how advancements in these areas will revolutionize the business world. Register now. Quote of the day “I would say it’s a bigger challenge than launching a rocket and putting it in orbit around the Earth… because it has to be done safely over and over and over again.” —Waymo’s chief executive John Krafcik tells the Financial Times developing safe driverless cars is far harder than rocket science. Top image credit: MUSHON ZER-AVIV/USAF Second image credit: OPENAI Please send avocado armchairs to hi@technologyreview.com. Follow me on Twitter at @charlottejee. Thanks for reading! —Charlotte Was this newsletter forwarded to you, and you'd like to see more? Sign up for free Don't settle for half the story. Subscribe to MIT Technology Review for access to subscriber-only content and more. Follow us: MIT Technology Review One Main Street Cambridge, MA 02142

Want to change how you receive these emails?

You can *update your preferences or *unsubscribe from this list. 

Subscription Information

This email was sent to Webmaster220 Bible Study Blog  

*the blog owner has deleted the hyperlink intentionally