Greetings, Future Tensers,
Last week, the FBI announced that a third party had furnished an alternate way to access the San Bernardino shooter’s phone. And by Monday, it had found a way in, though as Lily Hay Newman writes in Future Tense, that doesn’t mean the real struggle over law enforcement access to devices is over. For now, at least, Fred Kaplan argues the FBI’s conflict with Apple ended in a draw: The former didn’t quite get what it presumably wanted—a sweeping precedent—but the latter has also been pulled down a little by the revelation of a vulnerability in its security software.
While Apple continued to spar over privacy, one of its chief competitors found itself under more bemused public scrutiny. A Twitter chatbot created by Microsoft almost immediately started hitting on users who contacted it and was later deactivated after it began spewing racist garbage. There’s a helpful reminder here that computers still mostly do just what we teach them to do. It’s a lesson that’s further affirmed by closer inspection of reports that a Japanese A.I. “almost” won a literary prize.
Here are some of the other stories that we read while computers read our lips this week:
- Gamification: Uber hid a coding challenge in its app to recruit potential hackers, but you can only play it if you live in certain areas.
- Education: A new initiative aims to provide low-income students with free access to e-books.
- Streaming media: Netflix has been providing customers on AT&T and Verizon with a degraded version of its service, a bizarre choice with important net neutrality implications.
- E-sports: In China, video gamers fill a double role, both celebrated for their accomplishments and derided for their passions.
Events:
- Speaking of e-sports, what’s the deal with competitive gaming? Join Future Tense in New York City at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 5, for a conversation about the future of entertainment. For more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website.
Backing up my data,
Jacob Brogan
for Future Tense
