Update at foot of post. News service Al Arabiya isreportingfrom Egypt that missing Google executive Wael Ghonim has been released from custody after a ten day detention. Ghonim has been missing since 28 January and hasreportedlybeen adopted as an unofficial mascot for protesters calling for the removal of the country’s president, Hosni Mubarak. Google recentlyappealedfor help to find Ghonim, and yesterday it emerged that he had been imprisoned and was set for release at 4pm local time today....

Surprise! Facebook is being sued again. In on the action now is Mississippi woman, Brooke Rutledge, who also believes that Facebook is violating wiretap laws by tracking user-activity even after they’ve logged off of the social networking platform. The lawsuit was filed just yesterday at the U.S. District Court in north Mississippi, following several other allegations from different states also rallying against the social super giant. I previously reported on Facebook user John Graham, a 42-year-old Leawood lawyer from Kansas, who isalso suing the leading social networkin representation of the 150 million Facebook users in the United States....

MIT Media Labs has a new logo, designed by Richard The, with a whopping 40,000 possible variations. On his website,The explainsthat an algorithm is used to produce the logos based on just three shapes and 12 different colors. The algorithm produces a logo for each staff member at the Labs, combining personal branding with organizational branding. Despite the unique nature of each logo, they are clearly related. According to the designer, the logo’s varying nature represents what MIT Media Labs does:...

MIT researchers working with funding from Google’s Jigsaw group recently conducteda pair of studiesto determine what, if any, potential impact deepfake AI technology political ads could have on US voters. In total, more than 7,500 people in the US participated in the paired studies – as far as we’re able to determine, that makes this the largest set of experiments on the subject. Participants were split into three groups; one group watched a video, the second read a text transcript of the video, and the third acted as a control group so they received no media prompts....

MIT researchers have used AI to predict which technologies are rapidly improving — and which ones are overhyped. In a new study, the team quantitatively assessed the future potential of 97% of the US patent system. The fastest-improving domains werepredominantly software-related. They then converted their findings intoan online systemin which users can enter keywords to find improvement forecasts for specific technologies. Their research could give entrepreneurs, researchers, investors, and policy-makers clues about the future opportunities in tech....