Your Fitbit is 'useless' unless you consent to illegal data sharing, says advocacy group | What happens when AI passes through the ‘uncanny valley’? | Financial Times | Can the Squid Hunter Capture the Sea’s Most Elusive Creature?

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Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium Your Fitbit is 'useless' unless you consent to illegal data sharing, says advocacy group    Vienna-based advocacy group Noyb has filed complaints against Fitbit in Austria, the Netherlands, and Italy, alleging that the Google-owned fitness tracking company is in violation of EU data privacy regulations. Fitbit — which sells watches that track activity, heart rate, and sleep — "forces" new users of its app to consent to data transfers outside the EU, said Noyb. Currently, the only way Fitbit users can withdraw their consent is by deleting their accounts entirely, which would mean losing all their previously tracked workouts and health data. Continued here What happens when AI passes through the 'uncanny valley'? | Financial Times    Back in 1970, a Japanese engineering professor called Masahiro Mori wrote an intriguing paper (opens a new window)suggesting that a person's response to a robot would shift from affinity to revulsion the more lifelike it became. He called this phenomenon the "uncanny valley". Children may love toy robots, which are hard to confuse with a living creature. But we feel much more uneasy when we see physical robots — or nowadays digital avatars — that closely resemble humans and realise they are not human. What happens, though, when our artificial creations become so convincing that they pass through the uncanny valley to the other side? For better or worse, we may soon find out, in the digital world at least. Continued here Can the Squid Hunter Capture the Sea's Most Elusive Creature?    On a moonless January night in 2003, Olivier de Kersauson, the French yachtsman, was racing across the Atlantic Ocean, trying to break the record for the fastest sailing voyage around the world, when his boat mysteriously came to a halt. There was no land for hundreds of miles, yet the mast rattled and the hull shuddered, as if the vessel had run aground. Kersauson turned the wheel one way, then the other; still, the gunwales shook inexplicably in the darkness. Kersauson ordered his crew, all of whom were now running up and down the deck, to investigate. Some of the crew took out spotlights and shone them on the water, as the massive trimaran—a three-hulled, hundred-and-ten-foot boat that was the largest racing machine of its kind, and was named Geronimo, for the Apache warrior—pitched in the waves. Meanwhile, the first mate, Didier Ragot, descended from the deck into the cabin, opened a trapdoor in the floor, and peered through a porthole into the ocean, using a flashlight. He glimpsed something by the rudder. “It was bigger than a human leg,” Ragot recently told me. “It was a tentacle.” He looked again. “It was starting to move,” he recalled. He beckoned Kersauson, who came down and crouched over the opening. “I think it’s some sort of animal,” Ragot said. Continued here

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