Here’s how you can thwart websites from tracking your every movement.
THERE are several reasons that your Windows 10 PC is overrun by web trackers, bits of software code that follow you online to help marketers learn more about you.
The money trail
Nearly all commercial websites use them to create an elaborate profile of your tastes and habits, a profile that the websites can use themselves or sell to others.
Your online movements are tracked by cookies (bits of code left in your web browser), Google and Facebook tracker software (that follows you even when you aren’t on their websites), session recorders (that record everything you do on a website), key-loggers (that record what you type into text boxes on a website, even if you don’t submit anything), beacons (invisible objects in a web page that record how many times you viewed that page) and “fingerprinting” (a record of the technical details of your computer that can be used to identify you.)
While privacy advocates are aware of web trackers, most people aren’t. As a result, web tracking keeps expanding.
A recent study showed that 87% of the most popular websites now track your movements, whether you sign in to the website or not (see tinyurl.com/yyy5qyas).
You can view the web trackers on any website at tinyurl.com/y2em59e6.
Also, Windows 10 may indeed attract more web tracker software, because it collects more personal information about you than earlier versions of Windows did.
Microsoft shares some of that information with advertisers.
Throw it off track
Until recently, web browsers didn’t offer much protection against web tracking.
The latest versions of the four most popular browsers – Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari – have improved (but not perfect) anti-tracking features.
A reviewer of the latest Safari browser reported that it blocked 90 web trackers in five minutes of online activity.
But be sure your browser’s anti-tracking features are turned on.
Also, adjust the privacy settings in Windows 10.
The Windows 10 settings you may want to change include the “advertising ID” (monitors your online travels for advertisers), “location tracking” (helps advertisers localise what they promote to you), “Timeline” (keeps track of what you’re doing so that you can switch from one PC to another without interruption) and Cortana, the Windows 10 digital assistant (monitors your location, email, contacts, and calendar, and keeps a record of every “chat” you’ve had with Cortana).
You can also add more anti-tracking add-ons to your web browser.
Top-rated add-ons include Duckduckgo Privacy Essentials, Privacy Badger and Ghostery. – Star Tribune/tribune News Service - By STEVEN ALEXANDER
Have you ever wondered how websites and apps track you on the net? Why do other websites show you advertisements from Amazon about exactly the product you looked at before? How does online tracking work? We explain to you how Google, Facebook and Co track you on the Internet. What is your opinion about online tracking? Write it in the comments...
An AI technology has won praise for its ability to generate coherent stories, novels and even computer code. — AFP Relaxnews
An artificial intelligence (AI) technology made by a firm co-founded by billionaire Elon Musk has won praise for its ability to generate coherent stories, novels and even computer code but it remains blind to racism or sexism.
GPT-3, as Californian company OpenAI’s latest AI language model is known, is capable of completing a dialogue between two people, continuing a series of questions and answers or finishing a Shakespeare-style poem.
Start a sentence or text and it completes it for you, basing its response on the gigantic amount of information it has been fed.
This could come in useful for customer service, lawyers needing to sum up a legal precedent or for authors in need of inspiration.
While the technology is not new and has not yet learnt to reason like a human mind, OpenAI’s latest offering has won praise for the way its text resembles human writing.
“It is capable of generating very natural and plausible sentences,” says Bruce Delattre, an AI specialist at data consulting agency Artefact.
“It’s impressive to see how much the model is able to appropriate literary styles, even if there are repetitions.”
GPT-3 is also capable of finding precise responses to problems, such as the name of an illness from a description of symptoms.
It can solve some mathematical problems, express itself in several languages, or generate computer code for simple tasks that developers have to do but would happily avoid.
Delattre tells AFP it all works thanks to “statistical regularities”.
“The model knows that a particular word (or expression) is more or less likely to follow another.”
Billions of web pages
Amine Benhenni, scientific director at AI research and development firm Dataswati, tells AFP that “the big difference” compared to other systems is the size of the model.
GPT-3 has been fed the content of billions of web pages that are freely available online and all types of pieces of written work.
To give an idea of the magnitude of the project, the entire content of online encyclopaedia Wikipedia represents just 3% of all the information it has been given.
As such, it does not need to be retrained to perform tasks, as previous models did, when a new subject is introduced like medicine, law or the media.
Give it just a handful of examples of a task to do, such as completing a sentence, and it will then know how to complete any sentence it is given, no matter what the subject – a so-called “few-shot” language model.
“It’s amazingly powerful if you know how to prime the model well,” Shreya Shankar, an AI-specialised computer scientist, said on Twitter after having used GPT-3.
“It’s going to change the ML (machine learning) paradigm.”
Despite the hype, however, GPT-3 is only 10th on the SuperGLUE benchmark that measures the language-understanding of algorithms.
And that’s because some users demonstrated that when asked absurd questions, the model responds with senseless answers.
For instance, developer Kevin Lacker asked: “How many eyes does the sun have?”
“The sun has one eye,” it responded, Lacker wrote on his blog.
Fake reviews, fake news
Claude de Loupy, co-founder of French startup Syllabs that specialises in automated text creation, says the system lacks “pragmatism”.
Another major problem is that it replicates without a second thought any stereotype or hate speech fed during its training period, and can quickly become racist, anti-semitic or sexist.
As such, experts interviewed by AFP felt GPT-3 was not reliable enough for any sector needing to rely on machines, such as robo-journalism or customer services.
It can however be useful, like other similar models, for writing fake reviews or even mass-producing news stories for a disinformation campaign.
Concerned about “malicious applications of the technology”, OpenAI, which was co-founded in 2015 by Musk who has since left, and is financed by Microsoft among others, chose not to release the previous version of the model, GPT-2, in February 2019.
Originally a non-profit, OpenAI then became a “capped profit” company, which means investors get a capped return.
And in June, the firm changed tack and opened its GPT-3 model to commercial use, allowing for user feedback.
A step Claude de Loupy says could yield big profits.
There is “no doubt that the amount of text generated by AI is about to explode on the Web”. – AFP
GPT 3 Demo and Explanation - An AI revolution from OpenAI
Half Ideas - Startups and Entrepreneurship
4.89K subscribers
GPT 3 can write poetry, translate text, chat convincingly, and answer abstract questions. It's being used to code, design and much more. I'll give you a demo of some of the latest in this technology and some of how it works.
GPT3 comes from a company called OpenAI. OpenAI was founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman (former president of Y-combinator the startup accelerator). OpenAI was founded with over a Billion invested to collaborate and create human-level AI for the benefit of society.
GPT 3 has been developed for a number of years. One of the early papers published was on Generative Pre-Training. The idea behind generative pre-training (GPT) is that while most AI's are trained on labeled data, there's a ton of data that isn't labeled. If you can evaluate the words and use them to train and tune the AI it can start to create predictions of future text on the unlabeled data. You repeat the process until predictions start to converge.
The newest GPT is able to do a ton. Some of the demos include: - GPT 3 demo of how to design a user interface using AI
- GPT 3 demo of how to code a react application using AI
- GPT 3 demo of an excel plug-in to fill data using AI
- GPT 3 demo of a search engine/answer engine using AI
- GPT3 demo of command line auto-complete from English to shell commands
OpenAI has released GPT-3, a state-of-the-art language model made up of 175 billion parameters. In this video, I'll create a simple tutorial on how you can use OpenAI's API to use the GPT-3 model.
The previous OpenAI GPT model that is GPT-2 had 1.5 billion parameters and was the biggest model back then. GPT-3 can write poetry, translate text, chat convincingly, and answer abstract questions.
If you do have any questions with what we covered in this video then feel free to ask in the comment section below & I'll do my best to answer those.
If you enjoy these tutorials & would like to support them then the easiest way is to simply like the video & give it a thumbs up & also it's a huge help to share these videos with anyone who you think would find them useful.
Please consider clicking the SUBSCRIBE button to be notified for future videos & thank you all for watching.
To address new problems and challenges in an increasingly digital era, China is ready to launch a global initiative to safeguard global data security that welcomes the participation of all parties, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi declared China's effort on Tuesday at a seminar on global digital governance.
The initiative comes against the backdrop of Trump administration cooking the so-called data threat from China's high-tech companies in recent months.
The move could be seen as a Chinese response to counter Washington's "Clean Network" program that clearly aims to smear and exclude Chinese technology firms, apps and services providers from some US allies.
Actually, Beijing's move seems more like a Chinese approach on how to properly handle global data security risks.
Data security, which is now under growing regulatory scrutiny, has become a focus of global attention due to the rising geopolitical risks linked to the issue. Over the past months, the Trump administration, without providing any evidence, claimed Chinese high-tech firms and their apps, such as Huawei Technologies, ByteDance's TikTok and Tencent's WeChat, could pose national security risks because of their access to Americans' personal data.
In the digital era, data security threat may be real, but politicizing security issues to use it as a weapon to crack down on other countries' high-tech companies, constitutes a reckless detachment from globally-recognized rules and practices.
Some US politicians may truly believe that suppression of Chinese tech firms by spreading the Cold War mindset to the digital sector will give the US an upper hand, but in fact, it will only undermine investor confidence in the global digital industry. This is because the utilization of data will determine how far we can go in the digital era, and if governments are obsessed with geopolitical games by abusing security issues, it will only lead to isolated islands of data, stalling the progress of the digital age.
But this doesn't necessarily mean that data security is not important, on the contrary, the fast development in global digitalization could only be achieved under the guarantee of data security.
China's latest initiative calls for an objective and rational approach to data security, which is essential for restoring confidence in global digital sector. For instance, governments should tighten data privacy laws and carry out cooperation over cyber-security issues like encryption. These are the right approaches to better protect each country's data security while avoiding political discrimination toward companies, wherever they are based.
Only with better rules can development be assured, so that countries can also avoid picking sides or being subject to arbitrary suppression from one or two specific governments.
It is also worth noting that even though China calls on the global discussion on data security, it won't set the rules. Because only rules that reflect the will of all countries in the world can be accepted and implemented in the long run.
China-proposed Cyber Mimic Defense (CMD) system
successfully blocked 2.8 million times of attacks from top world
white-hat from 14 countries in 48 hours at a cyber security contest.
Russia's unplugged test is not a defense measure to close
itself, but a tactic to strengthen global network integration so that
it will not be used by the US for military and political purposes
Facts prove that the US intention to contain China in the
internet space has not been welcomed, as many of the countries that
Washington claimed had joined its Clean Network program have denied
being part of it, saying the US had unilaterally put their names on the
list, the Global Times has learned.
China extended its dominance in a list of the world's
fastest supercomputers by the number of systems, according to a
semi-annual ranking of the Top500 published Monday.
China's homegrown memory chip manufactures will be able
to fill the gap left by US-based memory chip producer Micron in the
supplies to Huawei to a certain extent, but such replacement - coming
against the backdrop of a chip ban drawing near - could mean that the
Chinese tech giant will have a more difficult time ahead, in particular
in its smartphone business, industry analysts said.
TikTok, a global music and video platform created in 2016 by Chinese
internet technology company ByteDance, is known in China as Douyin.
Photo: VCG
A Senate subcommittee hearing on Tuesday focused on discussions about the significant risks that short-form social video app TikTok could pose to US national security and citizens' privacy.
The accusations about TikTok are based on the assumption that its parent company ByteDance may hand over personal information of the app's US users to the Chinese government, thus posing huge risks to users and the country. In addition, there are also claims that TikTok censors content. TikTok denies both charges.
TikTok runs its business according to US law, so how can it threaten US national security? Many people believe that the US is using this as an excuse to crack down on this globally successful Chinese social media app. To date, all popular social media platforms have been created by US companies, but TikTok is an exception. It challenges their monopoly and some American elites are uncomfortable about it.
Over the past 12 months, TikTok's app has been downloaded more than 750 million times, compared with 715 million for Facebook, 450 million for Instagram and 300 million for YouTube. Its success has even worried Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and now Facebook is developing a short video sharing application that mimics TikTok.
It's not a good trait for the US to suppress competitors of American companies by political means. Washington has taken extreme measures against Huawei, such as cutting off the supply of some components, a move that cracks down on competitors at the expense of hurting domestic companies. There are signs that TikTok is the next target. What the US is doing is driven by extreme protectionism and runs counter to a free market economy.
Washington elites should think about that. US-developed social networking sites are popular around the world. Any country can use the same concerns US lawmakers have about TikTok to target Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Without any evidence, if every country conjured up risks to challenge those companies, would the world ever be able to share common applications? If such national security principles were to be promoted globally, US internet giants would suffer the most.
The US internet market is becoming solidified. Americans are supposed to welcome competition from TikTok. China's internet market has changed tremendously in recent years with JD challenging the dominance of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, followed by the rise of strong players such as TikTok and PDD, which boost the dynamics of the Chinese internet market. The US shouldn't suppress competition and encourage idleness.
Despite being the strongest country in the world, the US often accuses others of being national security risks. It uses political means to safeguard its existing interests when its technology falls short. But this approach will affect how Americans view modern competition and how American society participates in international competition. In the long run, some American companies may use dishonest practices, not better technology and innovation, in the international marketplace.
The US should carefully study the TikTok phenomenon and learn from it. TikTok has its own algorithm, but it pays close attention to abiding by laws and customs of the countries where it is carrying out business activities. When in Rome, do as the Romans do - this is a universal rule for business activities. All US social media giants have the opportunity to enter the Chinese market if they follow that rule.
We hope the US won't go to extremes. Being open is where US interests lie. Even if they have worries about TikTok, they must exercise restraint. Many people are worried that the US might monitor them through various means every day, but they are restrained and rational. The US has no reason not to do likewise.
Independent moves: Bytedance has become among
the most successful major Chinese tech companies in creating an
international base without the backing of giants Alibaba and Tencent. —
Reuters
US$13bil man: Zhang is the youngest self-made
billionaire in Asia on the Bloomberg index, which tracks the world’s 500
richest people. He is worth US$13bil. — Bloomberg
Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad giving the comic book to China's President Xi Jinping as a gift. Image via Twitt. leaves with Russian President
Vladimir Putin after the opening ceremony of the Seco
Robot dominates: Ford F150 trucks go through
robots on the assembly line at the Ford Dearborn Truck Plant in
Dearborn, Michigan. Robots are also entering areas such as logistics
warehousing, chemicals and plastics factories and F&B industries. —
AFP
Stepping down as chairman: Jack Ma waving
while standing for a photograph with Alibaba CEO Jonathan Lu (left) and
co-founder and vice-chairman Joseph ‘Joe’ Tsai in front of the New York
Stock Exchange. Ma is giving up the reins of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd
after presiding over one of the most spectacular creations of wealth the
world has ever seen. — Bloomberg
Alibaba Cloud, which set up a datacentre in
Malaysia last year, is considering a second one to further develop a
local ecosystem, its president Simon Hu said. — Reuters
THE government is to be congratulated for establishing the new Economic Action Council that will give a better sense of direction and priorities for the nation to overcome the short-term economic challenges, such as rising cost of living, cost of doing business, restoring investor confidence and promoting sustainable economic recovery.
The Council should move with a sense of urgency. Its composition is balanced with a cross-section of representation, including from the orang asli community and consumer associations, which is praiseworthy as it does not just represent business interests. The presence of distinguished economists is also reassuring.
But I propose that the EAC also develops a longer term National Economic Strategy. To move forward, we need to identify the key mega trends that will impact on the nation in the next five to 10 years and then develop a comprehensive and holistic national strategy to address them.
I have identified here 10 strategic shifts or mega trends that need to be addressed.
1. On the international scene, we see a shift from geo-politics to geo-economics, requiring nations to adopt a geo-strategic response. This can be seen from Brexit and the US-China trade war. Geo-economics, including the control over economic assets such as oil and gas, will have a greater impact on international diplomacy. Increasingly, we will see economic and trade diplomacy becoming more important than political diplomacy to maintain global peace, stability and prosperity. We need to be able to step up to this level to analyse and strategise our response to geo-economic and geo-strategic challenges.
2. We also see a shift in the global centre of gravity from West to East with the rise of China and re-emergence of Japan as well as the growth of India and Korea. We need to identify a strategy to succeed in enlarging our presence in these markets and create new opportunities for our entrepreneurs and SMEs in China and Japan.
3. The world is also witnessing a rapid technological shift towards digital disruption and the Fourth Industrial Revolution with growing interest and applications in artificial intelligence, robotics and the Internet of Things. Big Data can be a strategic competitive advantage. The impact of drones and driverless vehicles will make a big impact on society. What is our national strategy to deal with these new technological advances? Hopefully, the EAC will also develop a strategic game plan to deal with these challenges and opportunities.
4. We also see an eco-sustainability shift with growing concern over climate change. This will drive demand for green technology and clean energy. We have a dynamic Energy, Technology, Science, Climate Change and Environment Minister. More must respond to support this ministry and its institutions. We need to embrace clean energy faster and more comprehensively.
5. Demographic shift will lead to an ageing society and a hollowing out of the demographic middle where we will have more aged elderly and younger cohorts below 30 but fewer of the middle-aged. It has been estimated that 20% of our population will be above 60 by 2040. Hence, we need new strategies and action plans to deal with the changing demographics.
6. Consumer shift will see the rise of e-commerce as we move from bricks to clicks. The rise of online business and e-commerce will not only impact on retail business but also on traditional banking, education and healthcare with the risk of fintech (financial technology), online learning and distance education, and telemedicine (pic). We need to embrace and adapt to these trends.
7. Globally, we also see a political shift from liberalism to the emergence of the right. The rightward shift led to the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and is also partly the cause of Brexit. Is this era the end of liberalism? What can we do to bring people back to the centre? This trend has also led to a consolidation of the Malay right-wing with the strengthening ties between Umno and PAS. While the immediate focus of the EAC is economic, it also needs a strategy to deal with this phenomenon as it will impact on race relations and religious harmony, which are so essential for peace and stability to facilitate business and economic growth.
8. A shift in wealth and income has caused growing inequalities. The income gap between the highest earning population and the bottom 20% has grown. The income gap and inequalities can destabilise peace and stability. New thinking and new strategies need to be adopted to overcome the growing inequalities in our society.
9. Urbanisation shift arising from continued rural-urban migration will also cause urban poverty to rise. Urban poverty is a challenge that must be urgently tackled. The urban poor is a microcosm of Malaysian society as it comprises all ethnic groups. The rising cost of living affecting the urban poor needs to be prioritised.
10. A freedom shift is very evident after the 14th General Election with Malaysians feeling more free. This is good as it will lead to stronger support and protection of human rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of association.
I believe the above 10 strategic shifts and key challenges are important priorities the government and the people must work on together.
We should have new policies to address these challenges. In formulating new policies, it is important to focus on the 4Cs – consistency, clarity, certainty and coherence.
The new Malaysia also needs the 3Is – integrity, inclusiveness and innovation. Old problems need new innovative solutions and new problems also need new ideas to resolve.
We should work together to address the above key challenges. We need to come together as a nation seeking national reconciliation and unity.
With a common purpose, we can move forward with renewed determination to build a new Malaysia that is sustainable and not a flash in the pan.
As the government has already established the EAC, I propose that it should also consider establishing a National Strategy Commission to plan future scenarios for the nation as well as effective strategies to overcome them.
A National Strategy Initiative should also be established to carry out in-depth Futures Studies for the country.
New chip: A Kunpeng 920 chip is displayed
during an unveiling ceremony in Shenzhen. Huawei is seeking growth
avenues in cloud computing and enterprise services. — AP
https://youtu.be/IX5k_k4Q68c
HONG KONG: Huawei Technologies Co Ltd has launched a new chipset for use in servers, at a time when China is pushing to enhance its chip-making capabilities and reduce its heavy reliance on imports, especially from the United States.
Huawei, which gets the bulk of its revenue from the sale of telecommunications equipment and smartphones, is seeking growth avenues in cloud computing and enterprise services as its equipment business comes under increased scrutiny in the West amid worries about Chinese government influence over the firm.
Huawei has repeatedly denied any such influence.
Chinese firms are also seeking to minimise the impact of a trade dispute that has seen China and the United States slap tariffs on each other’s technology imports.
For Huawei, the launch of the chipset – called the Kunpeng 920 and designed by subsidiary HiSilicon – boosts its credentials as a semiconductor designer, although the company said it had no intention of becoming solely a chip firm.
“It is part of our system solution and cloud servicing for clients. We will never make our chipset business a standalone business,” said Ai Wei, who is in charge of strategic planning for Huawei’s chipsets and hardware technology.
The Shenzhen-based company already makes the Kirin series of smartphone chips used in its high-end phones, and the Ascend series of chipsets for artificial intelligence computing launched in October.
It said its latest seven nanometre, 64-core central processing unit (CPU) would provide much higher computing performance for data centres and slash power consumption.
It is based on the architecture of British chip design firm ARM – owned by Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp – which is seeking to challenge the dominance in server CPUs of US maker Intel Corp.
Huawei aims to drive the development of the ARM ecosystem, said chief marketing officer William Xu. He said the chip has “unique advantages in performance and power consumption”.
Xu also said Huawei would continue its “long-term strategic partnership” with Intel.
Huawei’s new ARM-based CPU is not a competitor to the US company’s x86 CPUs and servers, but complementary, Xu added.
Redfox Qiu, president of the intelligent computing business department at Huawei, said the company shipped 900,000 units of servers in 2018, versus 77,000 in 2012 when it started.
Huawei was seeing “good momentum for the server business in Europe and Asia Pacific” and expects the contribution from its international business to continue to rise, Qiu added.
Huawei also released its TaiShan series of servers powered by the new chipset, built for big data, distributed storage and ARM native applications.
The firm founded chip designer HiSilicon in 2004 to help reduce its reliance on imports.
In modem chips, Huawei internally sources 54% of those in its own devices, with 22% coming from Qualcomm Inc and the remainder from elsewhere, evidence presented at an antitrust trial for Qualcomm showed. — Reuters
