#iot

[odinsblog]

IN THE FALL OF 2020, GIG WORKERS IN VENEZUELA POSTED A SERIES OF images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles—including some you really wouldn’t want shared on the Internet.

In one particularly revealing shot, a young woman in a lavender T-shirt sits on the toilet, her shorts pulled down to mid-thigh.

The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot’s Roomba J7 series robot vacuum. They were then sent to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers around the world to label audio, photo, and video data used to train artificial intelligence.

They were the sorts of scenes that internet-connected devices regularly capture and send back to the cloud—though usually with stricter storage and access controls. Yet earlier this year, MIT Technology Review obtained 15 screenshots of these private photos, which had been posted to closed social media groups.

The photos vary in type and in sensitivity. The most intimate image we saw was the series of video stills featuring the young woman on the toilet, her face blocked in the lead image but unobscured in the grainy scroll of shots below. In another image, a boy who appears to be eight or nine years old, and whose face is clearly visible, is sprawled on his stomach across a hallway floor. A triangular flop of hair spills across his forehead as he stares, with apparent amusement, at the object recording him from just below eye level.

iRobot—the world’s largest vendor of robotic vacuums, which Amazon recently acquired for $1.7 billion in a pending deal—confirmed that these images were captured by its Roombas in 2020.

Ultimately, though, this set of images represents something bigger than any one individual company’s actions. They speak to the widespread, and growing, practice of sharing potentially sensitive data to train algorithms, as well as the surprising, globe-spanning journey that a single image can take—in this case, from homes in North America, Europe, and Asia to the servers of Massachusetts-based iRobot, from there to San Francisco–based Scale AI, and finally to Scale’s contracted data workers around the world (including, in this instance, Venezuelan gig workers who posted the images to private groups on Facebook, Discord, and elsewhere).

Together, the images reveal a whole data supply chain—and new points where personal information could leak out—that few consumers are even aware of.

(continue reading)

[uzicake]

in this house we stan noah

[nixcraft]

Modern software development be like: I wrote 10 lines of code to call an API that calls another API, which calls yet another API that finally turns on a lightbulb. Pray that Cloudflare or AWS will not be down during this operation; otherwise, there will be no light for you.

[maplesynth]

playing with my m5 cardputer, wrote a software audio mixing library in micropython and made a crude sequencer with it

[neetzone]

[generativetenebrousautomata]

[geekysteven]

My electric toothbrush has Bluetooth and I can't think of a good reason to connect this to my phone. Does it just want to know which anime tiddys I've seen (all of them)

[blowery]

things normal people do: set up a separate wifi network just for problematic internet of trash devices that don't like modern 5Ghz networks.

[innonurse]

Denmark: A significant healthtech hub

- By InnoNurse Staff -

According to data platform Dealroom, Danish healthtech firms raised a stunning $835 million in 2023, an 11% rise over the previous record set in 2021.

Read more at Tech.eu

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Other recent news and insights

A 'Smart glove' could improve the hand movement of stroke sufferers (The University of British Columbia)

Oxford Medical Simulation raises $12.6 million in Series A funding to address the significant healthcare training gap through virtual reality (Oxford Medical Simulation/PRNewswire)

PathKeeper's innovative camera and AI software for spinal surgery (PathKeeper/PRNewswire)

Ezdehar invests $10 million in Yodawy to acquire a minority stake in the Egyptian healthtech (Bendada.com)

[craigbrownphd]

#Technology Unveiling the Future of Text Analysis: Trendy Topic Modeling with BERT https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2023/07/text-analysis-topic-modeling-with-bert/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

[nixcraft]

Internet of things.

credit

[adafruit]

Build an IoT project, the easy way! 🔌💡🌐

WipperSnapper is a firmware designed to turn any WiFi-capable board into an Internet-of-Things device without programming a single line of code.

[spacemonkey2e0vsz]

This cracks me up every time :-D

[tingvall]

A lot of ghost stories can be abstracted into that there is a "state" where there should be none; houses keeping the routines of the old dead owners, dolls remembering the name of kids...

With Internet of Things we are basically making everything haunted by introducing hidden states to our everyday objects. This brings up a need for proper digital exorcists.

We are building a world filled with witchcraft and wonders.

[feministdragon]

y’know, the internet used to be beautiful

and now it’s just so ugly

[nanotechnologyworld]

In this research, CEA-Leti fabricated innovative thin-film batteries on the institute's TINY platform. Standard microfabrication techniques and a 200 mm wafer integration process flow were used to produce sub-square-millimeter microbatteries with a specific areal capacity five times that of today's commercially-available products.