Author: Jim Isaak

“Alexa, tell me, in your own words, what happened on the night in question.” Actually the request is more like,…  Read More

The powers of big data, AI/analytics, and subtle data collection are now converging to a future only hinted at in Orwell’s 1984.

With Siri and Alexa, you are being asked to “bug your house” with a device that listens to every noise in the house.

The ability to kill a target from a “position of safety” is essentially the basic design criteria for many weapon systems.

Should children have toys that can combine speech recognition with a Wi-Fi connection to capture and respond to them, and that potentially are able to record their conversations as well as feed them “messages”?  Welcome to the world of Hello Barbie.

The insurance company’s privacy policy does not allow them to collect the data that their web page claims this device will collect — so clearly privacy is an afterthought.

A recent CBS Sixty Minutes program interviewed folks at U.S. DARPA, including a demonstration of how a recent hacking of…  Read More

Various states in the U.S. are using big data tools, such as the Lexus-Nexus database, to identify people who are…  Read More

Cyber attacks are increasing. What might be done about this, by technologists, by citizens, or by nation states?

The issue of how video games or movies affect behavior is a recurrent topic in academic and  public discourse.