A recent blog post, Google’s Monopoly is Stifling Free Software, made the front page of techmeme yesterday. The post raises important issues, though the message in the headline is wrong. The “Uncommon download” warning reported in that post presumably originates from Google’s Download Protection feature in Chrome. I don’t know Google’s internal...
Machine learning often uses lots of fancy math, but what it’s doing is very simple. Let’s focus on classification, a common type of machine learning where the system decides between two alternatives. This includes spam filtering, face recognition, fraud detection, and many others. Classification is a category of machine learning algorithms...
Common Concerns about AI Have you heard these memes before? “Not paying for Facebook? You’re not the customer; you’re the product.” “Google collects troves of your private data and sells it to advertisers.” People are concerned about big tech companies, and this often comes out in the form of memes like these. These memes are catchy but wrong. In...
