This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is also why (I think) that younger people don't like going outside. Cameras are everywhere. There's no privacy. We've become a world of creeps. Not really for the most of us. But if I was 10 years old I'd think everyone as creeps.
Now corporations are forcibly creeping into the classrooms. Yuck!
The world is turning into one giant shitty customer service experience.
The whole trend of teens rejecting phones for dumbphones is making sense now. If you can't fight big mainstream technology, then fuck big mainstream technology!
Holy shit, the amount of surveillance the teens are under is ungodly and people blame the chatbot? And there wasn't even a human kind enough to speak with the girl before calling the fucking cops? I see a lot of blame to place here, but it's not the chatbot who is to blame.
Everyone of them failed a 13 year old girl. All of them should be ashamed.
The cops for arresting an 8th-grader
This is America, that's what they do. They love overreacting to small problems.
I was arrested for self-defence in a highschool fight, the actual bully who attack me did not get in any sort of trouble. If I didn't have citizenship, there was a chance that incident could've led to my deportation, even tho I was a minor. (USCIS can see all your arrests, including those that did not led to a conviction, or even expunged or pardoned offences, and they could retroactively revoke your legal status if they find out you lied.) But luckily charges were dropped because of couse they don't have the evidence to prove it and I have a clean record so they didn't bother prosecuting.
There is probably an alternate timeline somewhere out there in the multiverse where I got deported and had to learn another language that I haven't spoken for over a decade. Depressing to think about.
(Well that is still technically a possibility, all they have to do is make up some bullshit about "being a spy" and put me in gitmo)
I'm in Canada and it's only marginally better with respect to police under/overreaction. A friend and I once got the "don't go to school on X day" message and we went immediately to local, provincial, and federal police. No one took us seriously. We had a friend working at CSIS (American analogue would be CIA) look into it and later that week we saw the article in a local paper.
Police investigated the home and found:
Point being we couldn't get the police to lift a finger to check out what we believed to be a credible threat (this guy never even joked about that stuff), but boy were they willing to burn rubber racing to my school when I committed the crime of defending myself in a "normal" school fight and one of my bullies claimed they felt threatened by me. This event set off a whole series of events, like requiring me to get a full evaluation at a psychiatric facility, before being allowed back in school. Our system is broken.
What is sad is that an environment like this ruins someone’s mental health and ironically increasing the overall risk of violence.
Don't remember whose quote it was, maybe Hannah Arendt, that the real tragedy of tyranny is not when people self-censor what they say out loud, but when this leads them to filter out those thoughts from arising at all
That's the surveillance panopticon, they know they are being watched, but not when.
Students who think they are chatting privately among friends often do not realize they are under constant surveillance
This is the problem
There is something fundamentally fucked up in a country that arrests and puts in jail a 13 years old kid over a bad joke.
And strip-searched!
Without notifying parents
Oh I missed that bit. JFC she's 13. How can police be so clueless about their own job... rhetorical question, I know the answer.
But can't put the pedo convicted felon grifter behind bars...
We are living in the shittiest kind of cyberpunk dystopia. Can't wait for AI-induced cyber-psychosis once people implant Musk's chips into their brains and give MechaHitler full access to their subconscious.
With the help of artificial intelligence, technology can dip into online conversations and immediately notify both school officials and law enforcement.
Not sure what's worse here: how the police overreacted or that the software immediately contacts law enforcement, without letting teachers (n.b.: they are the experts here, not the police) go through the positives first.
But oh, that would mean having to pay somebody, at least some extra hours, in addition to the no doubt expensive software. JFC.
Not sure what’s worse here: how the police overreacted or that the software immediately contacts law enforcement, without letting teachers (n.b.: they are the professionals here, not the police) go through the positives first.
The idea behind the policy is to stop school shootings. If there were a legitimate threat of violence, you would likely want the police to be notified as soon as possible. The issue here is that the authorities are letting a piece of half-ass code (Read: AI) decide what is a legitimate threat and, worse still, acting on that determination without question.
They have literally sacrificed an essential freedom for some temporary, and probably illusory, security.
Man, if only there was a good way to stop school shooting
Alas, one can only dream
"no way to stop this" says the only country where this happens
I hate how fully leapfrogged the conversation about surveillance was. It's so disgusting that it's just assumed that all of your communications should be read by your teachers, parents, and school administration just because you're a minor. Kids deserve privacy too.
This is exactly what is going to happen with the fucking chat control of the EU actually enforces it, but for an entire continent. Fuck this shit. Privacy is a human right.
I can't say for certain because I wasn't given one but I can't imagine me and my friends would have been willing to communicate with each other on devices provided by our school. Even in the early 00s it would have been filled with spyware.
I cannot possibly imagine trusting a school issued device.
Lots of wannabe authoritarians out there in educationland.
All those decades that the schools just -couldn't afford- more (well-educated) teachers and smaller class sizes. Lots of low-end look-good.
And then along came tech, and lo-and-behold, IT was going to be the savior. Let's buy into that! We may not be able to teach them to read, write or think, but they can learn to kneel!
I was already glad being out of school before widespread take-home laptops and required after-school logging in to check for homework and shit, but this AI-driven surveillance is on a whole other level. Sometimes I'm wondering if it's just me getting old and doing the old people thing thinking things were better "back in the day" but is this current state not objectively worse, being monitored so much and having no way to really disconnect from school?
Citizen, Friend Computer has detected Bad Thought ^(tm)^ in your area! Please do not be alarmed! Remain where you are, a team of selected Troubleshooters will begin deploying Martin-Marietta neuron adjusters as quickly as possible.
Do not worry about side-effects: Martin-Marietta's studies have shown most people respond positively to having their neurons rewired! Plus it feels good.
Its not a technology issue, its a capitalism issue.
Idealy, people should be able to afford their own devices and just log in via a browser, but capitalism fucks everyone and kids are too poor to have their own laptop and has to use the school-issued one which is obviously managed and surveilled because they can't have you watching porn on it.
Also, #SaveSnowDays, stop forcing an online meet if its snowing and they cant get to school, just let kids have a day off once in a while.
“I wish that was treated as a teachable moment, not a law enforcement moment,” said Patterson.
Seems like the Gaggle CEO has a good view. They're still an enabler in these situations. Be it poor guidance or training. With the impact they have, taking responsibility would be tracking and ceasing contracts that do not follow this soft response approach.
Thought control
Talking about online privacy has become the “safe sex talk” of the last decade or so. You have to keep reminding kids so that it sticks. Nothing you say online is private, it can all be copied/screengrabbed/recorded/photographed and shared by the recipient. What you say, any images you post, etc. On school or work devices they can essentially see most everything, nothing is private. Even if you make efforts to cover your tracks, a truly determined agency with enough resources likely will find out who you are if they want to.
More free child labor in jails.
Arrested and strip-searched for a first offense? That's fucking ridiculous. I hope the lawsuit succeeds. It's the only peaceful tool we have to curb over-zealous law enforcement.
Before the morning was even over, the Tennessee eighth grader was under arrest. She was interrogated, strip-searched and spent the night in a jail cell, her mother says.
Earlier in the day, her friends had teased the teen about her tanned complexion and called her “Mexican,” even though she’s not. When a friend asked what she was planning for Thursday, she wrote: “on Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s.”
This is an ass-covering response to school shootings, because some of the shooters have expressed their intent before.
A strip search obviously isn't necessary even if it's a credible threat; a metal detector wand and basic pat down is more than enough to ensure someone doesn't have a gun. This wasn't a credible threat though, and a chat with the school counselor would have been the right way to handle this.
I mean pretty stupid to write that in the schools chat app, use signal or shit just regular iMessage
Anything with a very low rate of true positives applied to a large population is going to have an insane false positive rate. EG a 1 in 7M issue applied to 70M students with a 1% false positive rate would produce 700k false positives. Worse people who are actually planning a school shooting may be more likely to avoid telegraphing their intentions. So you could damage 700k kids futures and traumatize them without even catching many or any of the killers.
You know what really grinds my gears? This shitty dystopia completely eschews any potentially cool aspect of invasive exploitative authoritarianism. The (not so) secret police is patching together their own "uniforms" by browsing the bargain bins at the local tacti-cool mall-ninja outfitters. Where's the black leather trench coats, stylish sunglasses worn after dark and slicked back hair? If they're going to ask me for 'ze papers' all the time, the least they can do is look cool doing it, godamnit. At least get Hugo Boss to design your attire; that's just about the only thing that worked out well for the last bunch of pricks.
I mean, where's the towering brutalist architecture? Where's my mandatory daily dose of SOMA? Or my idiotically wirelessly hackable cyberware? Hell, they can't even do bread and circuses right anymore. The bread is CO2-pumped flour glue and the circuses is an endless stream of more Marvel projects and Disney violations of Star Wars.
And don't get me started on the quality of our dictators these days. They sure don't make them like they used to.
My sense of humor is dry, dark, and absurdist. I’d go to jail every week for the sorts of things I joke about if I was a kid today. This is complete lunacy.
Example of an average joke on my part: speed up and run over that old lady crossing the street!
It makes my partner laugh. I laugh. We both know I don’t mean it. But a crappy AI tool wouldn’t understand that.
Some good news here is that if they apply this to society as a whole the jails would be too full, keep saying the no-no words online!
The next few years is going to be like the time Post Office employees were hounded and had their lives destroyed over what was later found to be a software fault and not mass Human corruption, but on a far grander scale.
What a great way to prepare students for our AI enabled social media and digital surveillance society. Take note kids, trust no one!
Another school shooting avoided! Just kidding, we just tortured a child for fun.
