Internet is Politics

U.S. State Department begins social media screening for almost everyone applying for a visa

On Saturday, the U.S. State Department began implementing the requirement that almost everyone applying for a U.S. visa must submit social media usernames, previous email addresses, and phone numbers as part of the application process. This could affect up to 15 million would-be travellers looking to enter the United States.

The new screening process was first proposed in March 2018. But the application forms requesting the additional information were just updated by the State Department. Previously, additional screening information – including email addresses, phone numbers, and social media accounts – has been required only for applicants identified for extra scrutiny. About 65,000 applicants per year have fallen into that category, primarily people who have travelled to areas with a high degree of terrorist activity.

"National security is our top priority when adjudicating visa applications, and every prospective traveller and immigrant to the United States undergoes extensive security screening," the department said in a statement to the Associated Press. "We are constantly working to find mechanisms to improve our screening processes to protect U.S. citizens, while supporting legitimate travel to the United States."

DeepMind's A.I. beats human players in Quake III's Capture the Flag

After conquering Go and chess, Google-owned DeepMind began tackling multiplayer games – a category that usually requires teamwork. In a paper published in Science, DeepMind researchers have described how they designed an A.I. system that mastered capture-the-flag mode in Quake III.

The DeepMind players are all "A.I. agents", which can play with or against human opponents. These agents were trained with 450,000 rounds of capture-the-flag gameplay (4 years of gameplay) over a few weeks. The A.I. agents started out doing random movements but figured out the strategies and techniques that work over time.

The agents successfully competed against human players even when their reaction times were slowed to match a human's. They "clearly exceeded the win-rate of humans in maps that neither agent nor human had seen previously," the paper states.

The skills DeepMind's A.I. picks up from complex games could be used by warehouse robots that need to work together. They could also lead to a solution that would allow self-driving cars to navigate heavy traffic. However, A.I. agents are only responding to whatever is happening in the game – they are not communicating with each other like groups of humans or other animals.

U.S. Tech giants are increasingly involved in international relations – and it's getting messy

Twitter suspended a large number of Chinese user accounts, including those belonging to critics of China's government. "They 'happen' to be accounts critical of China, both inside and outside China," wrote Yaxue Cao, founder and editor of the U.S.-based publication China Change. The move seems to be particularly ill-timed, occurring just days before the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4.

"These accounts were not mass reported by the Chinese authorities — this was a routine action on our part," Twitter said. "Sometimes our routine actions catch false positives or we make errors. We apologize. We're working today to ensure we overturn any errors but that we remain vigilant in enforcing our rules for those who violate them."

Facebook, on the other hand, removed 51 accounts, 36 Pages, seven Groups and three Instagram accounts involved in "coordinated inauthentic behaviour" originated in Iran. Facebook claims that the individuals behind the activity — which also took place on other internet platforms and websites — misled people about who they were and what they were doing.