“Did you know links sent privately through Messenger can be read by anyone? Moreover, Facebook knows about this and has no plans to fix the issue.” So states the opening paragraph of this story from Quartz, which might alarm anyone who’s shared a link through Facebook’s private messaging systems. These links are stored on Facebook, and the author of the story — described as a 21-year-old ethical hacker in Belgium — found vulnerabilities in the system. Through experimentation and some light coding, he found he could request to view private links sent through Facebook, including Google Documents, relatively easily (he tested it with a friend). Why does this matter? Because even if you’re just sending gifs or silly articles through Facebook messenger, the URLs can contain personal information like names, locations and keys to unlock other private pages.
“Why you shouldn’t share links on Facebook,” Quartz
Anyone who’s taking even a cursory sampling of a language class knows that different languages don’t always say things in the same way. In The Atlantic, linguist John McWhorter shows just how differently human languages express the same concepts. McWhorter uses the sentence “The father said ‘Come here!’” as a blueprint. In German, you have to mark the gender of the father (even though that may seem obvious), remember to use the form of "here" that refers to motion and — it just seems natural in German — remember to use the singular rather than plural form of the verb for "said." In Mandarin Chinese, it turns out, you don’t really have to mark gender, tense or attribution in such a sentence.
In a language spoken in the Caucasus, a verb like “see” has to pack into it exactly who was seen, who this seeing was significant to, how many people saw, and whether or not the speaker describing the seeing knows for sure. Do these variations mean that people who speak different languages see the world in different ways? Not to any real degrees, argues McWhorter: These kinds of variations are just fascinating accidents.
“The World’s Most Efficient Languages,” The Atlantic
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote a piece in Slate arguing that the future of artificial intelligence is in humans and artificial intelligence working together — and that these possibilities for collaboration often get forgotten. “Our perception of A.I. seems trapped somewhere between the haunting voice of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey and friendlier voices in today’s personal digital assistants — Cortana, Siri, and Alexa,” he writes. In the piece, Nadella touches on fears of an artificial intelligence “singularity,” Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, and a Microsoft developer whose life has been transformed by technology that mitigates his disability. Ultimately, Nadella concludes that development in AI has to be transparent, and has to be designed to serve human beings first and foremost.
“The Partnership of the Future,” Slate
