Republican plan would make deanonymization of census data trivial

“Differential privacy” algorithm prevents statistical data from being tied to individuals.

President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have spent the better part of the president’s second term radically reshaping the federal government. But in recent weeks, the GOP has set its sights on taking another run at an old target: the US census.

Since the first Trump administration, the right has sought to add a question to the census that captures a respondent’s immigration status and to exclude noncitizens from the tallies that determine how seats in Congress are distributed. In 2019, the Supreme Court struck down an attempt by the first Trump administration to add a citizenship question to the census.

But now, a little-known algorithmic process called “differential privacy,” created to keep census data from being used to identify individual respondents, has become the right’s latest focus. WIRED spoke to six experts about the GOP’s ongoing effort to falsely allege that a system created to protect people’s privacy has made the data from the 2020 census inaccurate.

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NASA races to keep Artemis II on schedule, even when workers aren’t being paid

“I do think we’re rapidly approaching the point where it will be a significant impact.”

It has been nearly one month since many parts of the federal government shut down after lawmakers missed a budget deadline at the end of September, but so far, NASA’s most critical operations have been unaffected by the political impasse in Washington, DC.

That may change soon. Federal civil servants and NASA contractors are not getting paid during the shutdown, even if agency leaders have deemed their tasks essential and directed them to continue working. Jobs classified as essential include employees operating and safeguarding the International Space Station and NASA’s fleet of robotic probes exploring the Solar System and beyond.

Many employees at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida remain at work, too. Their job is to keep the Artemis II mission on schedule for launch as soon as next February. In the four weeks since the start of the government shutdown, crews at Kennedy Space Center have completed several major milestones on the road to Artemis II, including the stacking of the Orion spacecraft atop its Space Launch System rocket inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building. This milestone, completed about one week ago, capped off assembly of the SLS rocket for Artemis II.

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Kriminalität: Mit KI gegen sadistische Ausbeutung

Eine KI soll Emojis und Jugendslang in verschlüsselten Chats interpretieren können, um Gefahren für Kinder und Jugendliche zu erkennen. (Cybercrime, KI)

Eine KI soll Emojis und Jugendslang in verschlüsselten Chats interpretieren können, um Gefahren für Kinder und Jugendliche zu erkennen. (Cybercrime, KI)