Weekly Roundup: Friday, 19 May, 2017
Here are some links I thought were worth sharing this week:
DATA PRIVACY
We Know All About You by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones review – the dangers of our surveillance society
When Oliver Cromwell established the Post Office as a state monopoly in 1657, he did so not because he wished to improve England’s communications, but because the opening of mail was considered to be “the best means to discover and prevent any dangerous and wicked designs against the Commonwealth”.
DATA SCIENCE
Introducing the TensorFlow Research Cloud
To accelerate the pace of open machine-learning research, Google are introducing the TensorFlow Research Cloud (TFRC), a cluster of 1,000 Cloud TPUs that will be made available free of charge to support a broad range of computationally-intensive research projects that might not be possible otherwise.
CYBER SECURITY
The need for urgent collective action to keep people safe online: Lessons from last week’s cyberattack
In this post from Brad Smith, Microsofts President and Chief Legal Officer there are two key points. 1) Despite any practical problems with updatng systems or the time and expense involved for organizations, not doing so is increasingly risky and delays could be costly, when systems are not patched you are "fighting the problems of the present with tools from the past". 2) Government actors need to report vulnerabilities to vendors, rather than stockpile, sell, or exploit them.
COMPANIES
Apple
Apple’s New Campus: An Exclusive Look Inside the Mothership
Fascinating preview of the new Apple campus by Steven Levy.
Facebook fined £94m for 'misleading' EU over WhatsApp takeover
Facebook has been fined €110m (£94m) by the EU for providing misleading information about its 2014 takeover of WhatsApp. When Facebook took over the WhatsApp messaging service in 2014, it told the commission it would not be able to match user accounts on both platforms, but went on to do exactly that.