What a TikTok Ban Won't Do

While Congress has been up in arms about TikTok, it has failed to pass even the most basic comprehensive privacy legislation to protect our data from being misused by all the tech companies that collect and mine it.

The even deeper problem is that putting TikTok under state control, banning it or selling it to a U.S. company wouldn’t solve the threats that the app is said to pose. If China wants to obtain data about U.S. residents, it can still buy it from one of the many unregulated data brokers that sell granular information about all of us. If China wants to influence the American population with disinformation, it can spread lies across the Big Tech platforms just as easily as other nations can.

it would be much more effective for China to just hack every home’s Wi-Fi router — most of which are manufactured in China and are notoriously insecure — and obtain far more sensitive data than it can get from knowing which videos we swipe on TikTok.

Investigative journalist Julia Angwin writing in the New York Times

29 Data Science Articles from Oct 2022

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Russia's anti-satellite threat tests laws of war in space

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The charge required to corrupt data is getting smaller all the time, meaning it is actually getting easier for cosmic rays to have this effect. Read more

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“Sweeping change is coming to the U.S. Army’s fleet of fixed-wing intelligence-gathering aircraft over the next several years.” Read more.

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The war in Ukraine has underlined the growing importance of space to armies on the ground

“For serious software development, the no-code/low-code approach doesn’t work when you need to develop mission critical software. It is even more far-fetched, then, to have only citizen data scientists running your AI/ML.” Read more.  

What will happen to the space debris in orbit?

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The NRO is “redefining how it works with the US Space Force and the US Space Command” to “expand the NRO’s space-based intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance” as it faces a “more complex near-peer adversary environment.” Read more.

How to create satellite imagery datasets and how to apply a classification model to them based on convolutional neural networks. Read more.  

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