Miguel Afonso Caetano

Senior Technical Writer @ Opplane (Lisbon, Portugal). PhD in Communication Sciences (ISCTE-IUL). Past: technology journalist, blogger & communication researcher.

#TechnicalWriting #WebDev #WebDevelopment #OpenSource #FLOSS #SoftwareDevelopment #IP #PoliticalEconomy #Communication #Media #Copyright #Music #Cities #Urbanism

Public Key

npub1pwuvltfvfme0d987k6rs3an6jnv9k2w32zqdlqt5hpy9u3cmv6ps2r95z7

NIP-05 Address

remixtures_at_tldr.nettime.org@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsqhwx045kyauhkjnltdpcg7eaffkzm98g4pqxls96tsjz7gudkdqcpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgqg5waehxw309aex2mrp0yhxgctdw4eju6t0hfsg6u

Publishing to

relay.nostr.band

relay.damus.io

relay.mostr.pub

Author Public Key

npub1pwuvltfvfme0d987k6rs3an6jnv9k2w32zqdlqt5hpy9u3cmv6ps2r95z7

Show more details

Last Notes

2024-11-09 14:37:50

- reply

"Apple quietly introduced code into iOS 18.1 which reboots the device if it has not been unlocked for a period of time, reverting it to a state which improves the security of iPhones overall and is making it harder for police to break into the devices, according to multiple iPhone security experts.
On Thursday, 404 Media reported that law enforcement officials were freaking out that iPhones which had been stored for examination were mysteriously rebooting themselves. At the time the cause was unclear, with the officials only able to speculate why they were being locked out of the devices. Now a day later, the potential reason why is coming into view.
“Apple indeed added a feature called ‘inactivity reboot’ in iOS 18.1.,” Dr.-Ing. Jiska Classen, a research group leader at the Hasso Plattner Institute, tweeted after 404 Media published on Thursday along with screenshots that they presented as the relevant pieces of code."
https://www.404media.co/apple-quietly-introduced-iphone-reboot-code-which-is-locking-out-cops/

2024-11-07 19:21:29

"While it’s true that our politics is thoroughly oligarchic, the power afforded entrepreneurs is problematic for separate reason. They rule us without ruling through politics. They rule directly in and through their economic power. The loans they get, the funds they raise, and the capital they wield is a direct power over the future direction of our collective life. Whether they decide to pour billions of dollars into AI or crypto, mushroom coffee or space travel, virtual reality glasses or self-driving cars, they determine the future course of our collective cultural and social development. They really do end up deciding what will be available for us to consume and produce, what our forms of enjoyment are and what our social interactions will be like.
And they make these decisions in an utterly unaccountable way. Precisely because their power is economic, a question of how they spend their immense sums of capital, they decide for us all without it being all that clear that is what they are doing. They are, at most, accountable to their creditors, who they have to pay back – or spin a tale to explain why they need another loan. But in virtue of that dependence on creditors, they can utterly ignore the public itself. That is a special kind of power to rule. It is the anti-democratic power of the entrepreneurial elite. It is their native power, which requires no conversion of wealth into oligarchic domination, no insidious corruption of our democratic procedures or public officials. They can shape the future of society, the trajectory of culture, without passing any laws."
https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-machiavellis-of-the-market-entrepreneurs-against-democracy/
#Entrepreneurs #SiliconValley #BigTech #Democracy #Capitalism #Entrepreneurship

2024-11-05 12:22:30

"Not only is anti-Palestinian racism ubiquitous — it is the most virulent and pervasive form of racism to be found in the Euro-American political mainstream, the one that can be expressed most blatantly, with the least stigma attached to it. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, Olaf Scholz and Viktor Orbán can all shelter under the same capacious umbrella, united by the belief that Palestinian lives are worth less than those of Israelis or the citizens of Western countries.
(...)
Hostility to Palestinians is clearly the flip side of a strong attachment to Israel on the part of Euro-American power elites. That attachment is not simply a question of hardheaded strategic calculations about the value of Israel as a Western ally in one of the world’s most important regions. It also reflects the ideological utility of Israel as the source of an immensely powerful discursive weapon, one that allows those who wield it to present racism as anti-racism and vice versa.
By drawing up a clearer picture of anti-Palestinian bigotry — what it is and how it works — we can develop a better understanding of some of the most harmful tendencies in global politics today."
https://jacobin.com/2024/11/palestinians-western-antisemitism-israel-war
#Palestine #Israel #Gaza #AntiSemitism #Racism

2024-10-08 11:50:05

#AI #AITraining #Surveillance #Privacy #DataProtection #Ecovacs #Robots #RobotVaccum: "Ecovacs's privacy policy – available elsewhere in the app – allows for blanket collection of user data for research purposes, including:
- The 2D or 3D map of the user's house generated by the device
- Voice recordings from the device's microphone
- Photos or videos recorded by the device's camera
It also states that voice recordings, videos and photos that are deleted via the app may continue to be held and used by Ecovacs.
An Ecovacs spokesperson confirmed the company uses the data collected as part of its product improvement program to train its AI models.
Critical cybersecurity flaws – allowing some Ecovacs models to be hacked from afar – have cast doubt on the company's ability to protect this sensitive information.
Cybersecurity researcher Dennis Giese reported the problems to the company last year after he found a series of basic errors putting Ecovacs customers' privacy at risk.
"If their robots are broken like that," he asked, "how does their back-end [server] look?
"Even if the company's not malicious, they might be the victim themselves of corporate espionage or nation state actors."
Ecovacs — which is valued at $4.6 billion — said it is "proactively exploring more comprehensive testing methods" and committed to fixing the security issues in its flagship robot vacuum in November."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-05/robot-vacuum-deebot-ecovacs-photos-ai/104416632?utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=twitter&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web

2024-10-07 08:12:45

#Uber #GigEconomy #RideHailing: "[A] few years ago the company started rolling out a new pricing mechanism that disconnected driver pay from the rider’s fare, allowing it to pay drivers a lot less than the company was charging for a ride. Recently, More Perfect Union got some drivers in a room to see how this works — and how those drivers can be offered very different rates for the same rides, if Uber’s algorithms have enough data to believe they’ll accept a lower payment.
On top of that, Uber has continued to fight against the rights of workers in the United States and beyond. Earlier this summer, Ed Ongweso Jr. wrote about a deal in Minneapolis that, on its face, seemed positive for drivers, but was actually a compromise from the council to after Uber and Lyft threatened to pull their service in the city. More recently, a court in New Zealand ruled that the contractors who brought a case against Uber were in fact employees, setting up the potential for a wider reclassification. Instead, the extreme right-wing government currently leading the country announced it planned to change the law to make it easier for companies to ensure their workers can be — and will remain — contractors.
Once again, Uber is not only keeping its own workers down, but potentially hurting those in other industries too. How long will this company continue to get away with the harm it causes to workers on such a global scale?"
https://disconnect.blog/roundup-uber-is-cutting-workers-wages-globally/

2024-10-07 08:03:39

RT@jsrailton
UPDATE: German press now covering accusations that German #AfD Member of Parliament @MdLDornau uses political prisoners on his onion plantation in #Belarus.
Progress.
READ at @derspiegel [Transl.]:
https://spiegel.de/politik/zwiebelfarm-in-belarus-afd-abgeordneter-dornau-soll-inhaftierte-oppositionelle-beschaeftigt-haben-a-144f0d7d-764b-4f22-8eeb-2b4b57e948c5?sara_ref=re-so-app-sh

2024-09-26 17:23:13

- reply

"The FTC is taking action against DoNotPay, a company that claimed to offer an AI service that was “the world’s first robot lawyer,” but the product failed to live up to its lofty claims that the service could substitute for the expertise of a human lawyer.
According to the FTC’s complaint, DoNotPay promised that its service would allow consumers to “sue for assault without a lawyer” and “generate perfectly valid legal documents in no time,” and that the company would “replace the $200-billion-dollar legal industry with artificial intelligence.” DoNotPay, however, could not deliver on these promises. The complaint alleges that the company did not conduct testing to determine whether its AI chatbot’s output was equal to the level of a human lawyer, and that the company itself did not hire or retain any attorneys.
The complaint also alleges that DoNotPay offered a service that would check a small business website for hundreds of federal and state law violations based solely on the consumer’s email address. This feature purportedly would detect legal violations that, if unaddressed, would potentially cost a small business $125,000 in legal fees, but according to the complaint, this service was also not effective."
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/ftc-announces-crackdown-deceptive-ai-claims-schemes

2024-09-26 17:20:00

RT @random_walker
The FTC is going after a bunch of AI Snake Oil vendors but I'm especially happy about the "Robot Lawyer" company DoNotPay. They capitalized on the hype around GPT-4 passing the bar exam and other exams and misled and freaked out a lot of people about job replacement. The FTC's complaint document has so many juicy (and sleazy) details. https://ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/DoNotPayInc-Complaint.pdf

2024-09-24 10:22:39

#SocialMedia #Telegram #Privacy #Messaging #ContentModeration: "Telegram updated its privacy policy on Monday to say that the company will provide user data, such as IP addresses and phone numbers, to law enforcement agencies in response to a valid legal order.
The news is a significant shift in Telegram’s policies on providing data to law enforcement. It comes after French authorities arrested Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov in August, in part due to Telegram’s refusal to hand over data in response to lawful orders.
“If Telegram receives a valid order from the relevant judicial authorities that confirms you're a suspect in a case involving criminal activities that violate the Telegram Terms of Service, we will perform a legal analysis of the request and may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities,” the privacy policy read on Monday.
A day earlier, the policy only specifically mentioned terror cases. “If Telegram receives a court order that confirms you're a terror suspect, we may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities. So far, this has never happened,” an archived version of the policy reads."
https://www.404media.co/telegram-changes-policy-says-it-will-provide-user-data-to-authorities/

2024-08-16 07:41:22

RT @Abebab
I’m lost for words when i see the idea of “automating science” being celebrated and presented as the epitome of advancement
https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist/

2024-08-16 07:40:33

RT @alexeheath
Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt had Stanford pull a recent talk he gave where he said Google was caught off guard by ChatGPT because employees were working from home.
It turns out that wasn't the only eye-popping thing he said during the talk: https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220658/google-eric-schmidt-stanford-talk-ai-startups-openai

2024-07-14 10:38:00

RT @pranesh
"Left-wing" attention didn't push Signal to close this vulnerability in its desktop app. Thankfully, "right-wing" attentions seems to have succeeded.
#encryption #messaging.
https://gizmodo.com/signal-is-working-to-close-a-security-vulnerability-in-its-desktop-app-2000469908

2024-06-05 09:15:57

RT @emilymbender
"a potential gold mine for criminal hackers or domestic abusers who may physically access their victim’s device."
In 2024 it *still* somehow isn't standard practice to ask in the design process: Are we building the killer app for domestic abusers?
https://www.wired.com/story/total-recall-windows-recall-ai/

2024-05-24 20:08:27

RT @matthew_d_green
Several people have suggested that the EU’s mandatory chat scanning proposal was dead. In fact it seems that Belgium has resurrected it in a “compromise” and many EU member states are positive. There’s a real chance this becomes law.
https://netzpolitik.org/2024/internes-protokoll-belgien-will-nutzer-verpflichten-chatkontrolle-zuzustimmen/

2024-03-12 11:12:23

RT @ahcastor
Is there no honor among thieves? Apparently not. Incognito, a darknet narcotics market, is extorting all of its users. Pay $100 to $20,000 or all of your crypto transactions and chat record will be made public. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/incognito-darknet-market-mass-extorts-buyers-sellers/

2024-03-12 11:08:00

- reply

"While DALL-E developer OpenAI is busy fighting with Elon Musk, the creators of two other notable image generation AIs, Midjourney and Stability AI, seem to have sparked a beef of their own over the most ironic thing imaginable, considering the nature of the companies involved – image theft." https://80.lv/articles/midjourney-accuses-stability-ai-of-theft-bans-its-employees/

2024-03-12 11:07:11

#AI #GenerativeAI #MidJourney #StabilityAI #GeneratedImages #WebScraping: "On Wednesday, Midjourney banned all employees from image synthesis rival Stability AI from its service indefinitely after it detected "botnet-like" activity suspected to be a Stability employee attempting to scrape prompt and image pairs in bulk. Midjourney advocate Nick St. Pierre tweeted about the announcement, which came via Midjourney's official Discord channel.
Prompts are the written instructions (like "a cat in a car holding a can of a beer") used by generative AI models such as Midjourney and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion 3 (SD3) to synthesize images. Having prompt and image pairs could potentially help the training or fine-tuning of a rival AI image generator model."
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/03/in-ironic-twist-midjourney-bans-rival-ai-firm-employees-for-scraping-its-image-data/

2024-03-05 10:24:41

#CyberSecurity #Microsoft #Windows #Rootkits #NorthKorea: "Hackers backed by the North Korean government gained a major win when Microsoft left a Windows zero-day unpatched for six months after learning it was under active exploitation.
Even after Microsoft patched the vulnerability last month, the company made no mention that the North Korean threat group Lazarus had been using the vulnerability since at least August to install a stealthy rootkit on vulnerable computers. The vulnerability provided an easy and stealthy means for malware that had already gained administrative system rights to interact with the Windows kernel. Lazarus used the vulnerability for just that. Even so, Microsoft has long said that such admin-to-kernel elevations don’t represent the crossing of a security boundary, a possible explanation for the time Microsoft took to fix the vulnerability."
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/03/hackers-exploited-windows-0-day-for-6-months-after-microsoft-knew-of-it/

2024-02-24 10:39:13

#AI #GenerativeAI #Web #Search #SearchEngines #Chatbots: "The Browser Company’s new app lets you ask semantic questions to a chatbot, which then summarizes live internet results in a simulation of a conversation. Which is great, in theory, as long as you don’t have any concerns about whether what it’s saying is accurate, don’t care where that information is coming from or who wrote it, and don’t think through the long-term feasibility of a product like this even a little bit. Or, as Dash put it, “It’s the parasite that kills the host.”
The base logic of something like Arc’s AI search doesn’t even really make sense. As Engadget recently asked in their excellent teardown of Arc’s AI search pivot, “Who makes money when AI reads the internet for us?” But let’s take a step even further here. Why even bother making new websites if no one’s going to see them? At least with the Web3 hype cycle, there were vague platitudes about ownership and financial freedom for content creators. To even entertain the idea of building AI-powered search engines means, in some sense, that you are comfortable with eventually being the reason those creators no longer exist. It is an undeniably apocalyptic project, but not just for the web as we know it, but also your own product."
https://www.fastcompany.com/91033052/does-anyone-even-want-an-ai-search-engine?mc_cid=f22a3b4b18

2024-02-19 09:54:58

- reply

@npub19vn…xzqq Then why don't you found your own society in your own private island that you bought with your own money? Every society has its rules. It's OK to not to agree with these rules and challenge them through elections and democratic debate. But it's not OK to not follow them. In any case, you can always run away to your own private island.

2024-02-07 20:17:15

#AI #GenerativeAI #GeneratedImages #Meta #Watermarking: "Meta is working to detect and label AI-generated images on Facebook, Instagram and Threads as the company pushes to call out “people and organisations that actively want to deceive people”.
Photorealistic images created using Meta’s AI imaging tool are already labelled as AI, but the company’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, announced in a blog post on Tuesday that the company would work to begin labelling AI-generated images developed on rival services.
Meta’s AI images already contain metadata and invisible watermarks that can tell other organisations that the image was developed by AI, and the company is developing tools to identify these types of markers when used by other companies, such as Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Adobe, Midjourney and Shutterstock in their AI image generators, Clegg said."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/06/meta-ai-images-instagram-facebook-label-crackdown

2023-11-25 21:27:45

#AI #GenerativeAI #GPAI #OpenAI #ChatGPT: "The split between Altman and the board at least partly seemed to fall along ideological lines, with Altman and Brockman in a camp known as “accelerationists” – people who believe AI should be deployed as quickly as possible – and “decelerationists” – people who believe it should be developed more slowly and with stronger guardrails. With Altman’s return, the former group takes the spoils.
“The people who seem to have won out in this case are the accelerationists,” said Sarah Kreps, a Cornell professor of government and the director of the Tech Policy Institute in the university’s school of public policy.
Kreps said we may see a reborn OpenAI that fully subscribes to the Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” mantra. Employees voted with their feet in the debate between moving more quickly or more carefully, she noted.
“What we’ll see is full steam ahead on AI research going forward. Then the question becomes, is it going to be totally unsafe, or will it have trials and errors? OpenAI may follow the Facebook model of moving quickly and realizing that the product is not always compatible with societal good,” she said."
https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/23/huge-egos-are-in-play-behind-the-firing-and-rehiring-of-openais-sam-altman

2023-10-25 08:26:09

#Germany #Jews #Antisemitism #Palestine: "Germany’s commitment to memory is undeniably impressive; no other global power has worked nearly as hard to apprehend its past. Yet while the world praises its culture of contrition, some Germans—in particular, Jews, Arabs, and other minorities—have been sounding the alarm that this approach to memory has largely been a narcissistic enterprise, with strange and disturbing consequences. The leftist German Jewish writer Fabian Wolff argued in a viral 2021 essay that Germany’s attachment to the past had diminished the space for Jewish life in the present: Germans have no place for “Jewish life [that] exists outside their field of vision and their way of knowing,” he wrote, or for “Jewish conversations about Jewish issues [that] have a meaning beyond and apart from what these Germans themselves think or would like to hear."
https://jewishcurrents.org/bad-memory-2

2023-10-24 09:55:36

#Regulation #State #Government #Antitrust #Competition: "In Public Choice Theory, the biggest companies in an industry have the strongest interest in capturing the regulator, and they will work harder – and have more resources – than anyone else, be they members of the public, workers, or smaller rivals. This inevitably leads to capture, where the state becomes an arm of the dominant companies, wielded by them to prevent competition:
(...)
This is regulatory nihilism. It supposes that the only reason you weren't killed by your dinner, or your antilock brakes, or your collapsing roof, is that you just got lucky – and not because we have actual, good, sound regulations that use evidence to protect us from the endless lethal risks we face. These nihilists suppose that making good regulation is either a myth – like ancient Egyptian sorcery – or a lost art – like the secret to embalming Pharaohs.
But it's clearly possible to make good regulations – especially if you don't allow companies to form monopolies or cartels. What's more, failing to make public regulations isn't the same as getting rid of regulation. In the absence of public regulation, we get private regulation, run by companies themselves."
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

2023-10-21 10:11:08

#Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Bitcoin #Crime #USA #NY: "For years, a gang operating in New York allegedly offered a cash-for-Bitcoin service that generated at least $30 million, with men standing on street corners with plastic shopping bags full of money, drive-by pickups, and hundreds of thousands of dollars laid out on tables, according to court records.
The records provide rare insight into an often unseen part of the criminal underworld: how hackers and drug traffickers convert their Bitcoin into cash outside of the online Bitcoin exchanges that ordinary people use. Rather than turning to sites like Coinbase, which often collaborate with and provide records to law enforcement if required, some criminals use underground, IRL Bitcoin exchanges like this gang which are allegedly criminal entities in their own right.
In a long spanning investigation by the FBI involving a confidential source and undercover agents, one member of the crew said “that at least some of his clients made money by selling drugs, that his wealthiest clients were hackers, and that he had made approximately $30 million over the prior three years through the exchange of cash for virtual currency,” the court records read."
https://www.404media.co/inside-a-30-million-cash-for-bitcoin-laundering-ring-in-the-heart-of-new-york/

2023-10-04 17:09:24

#EU #AgeVerification #Privacy #DataProtection: "Based on the methods and risks analysed in this paper, we define six key risks of the use of age verification tools, in particular:
1. Violating children’s privacy and data protection rights;
2. Infringing upon children’s autonomy and self-expression online;
3. Letting companies control what children can see and do online;
4. Making anonymity online difficult or impossible;
5. Exacerbating structural discrimination; and
6. Creating a false sense of security
Read EDRi's analysis
After charting out the three main types of age verification, EDRi’s analysis concludes that there are no EU-wide ‘document-based verification’ or ‘estimation’ tools that minimise these risks to the extent that their widespread use could be considered compatible with children’s rights. Age ‘declaration’ tools are more likely to align with children’s rights, but they require additional research and development to improve their effectiveness. As a general rule, therefore, policy- and law-makers must not mandate age estimation or document-based verification measures."
https://edri.org/our-work/policy-paper-age-verification-cant-childproof-the-internet/

2023-10-04 03:27:26

São Francisco está a ferro e fogo!! São Francisco está a saque! Não venham até cá que isto aqui é o inferno dos EUA!! Está-se tão mal aqui…
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/111/174/617/344/883/743/original/1c387ebdec28b1a6.jpeg
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/111/174/617/365/199/809/original/529cf415ef9ba4bb.jpeg
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/111/174/617/399/375/525/original/2f9cf769e3c74993.jpeg
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/111/174/617/423/243/336/original/48c9613c0da7d200.jpeg

2023-09-26 23:37:41

- reply

https://archive.ph/O4tHR

2023-09-26 23:34:44

Vou andar por aqui nos próximos dias. Pelo que tenho andado a ler, parece-me que a cidade já viu piores dias e está muito lentamente a recuperar... Ainda assim, não tem absolutamente nada a ver com Detroit, Saint Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans ou até mesmo Chicago. Tirando esta última, essas cidades são manifestamente inseguras.
#USA #California #SanFrancisco: "Like any city, San Francisco is a complicated place with many story lines. It has a property-crime epidemic, but low rates of violent crime. It has a homelessness crisis and is pleading with a federal court for more leeway to clear tent encampments, but according to the most recent homeless count, there was a 15 percent drop in the homeless population living on its sidewalks between 2019 and 2022. Its downtown recovery has been glacial, but its unemployment rate is low at 3.6 percent.
The city has a record-high 31 percent office vacancy rate, and some prominent retail departures have drawn attention. But optimists say they hope these trends will open up space in the city for artists, nonprofit groups and possibly colleges.
There is no way to positively spin the drug crisis; 84 people died of overdoses in August, putting the city on track to tally 845 drug deaths this year, the most on record.
Since the pandemic upended life in downtowns across the nation, perhaps no major American city has suffered as severe a reputational hit as San Francisco.
But there are hopeful signs. Several new parks have opened in the city in recent years, including Tunnel Tops, where families flock on sunny weekends to picnic, stroll and take in views of the bay. The city has closed a couple of scenic thoroughfares to cars, most notably John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park, where people can now bike, roller skate or play a weathered grand piano.
While downtown struggles, previously sleepy neighborhoods are thriving."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/25/us/san-francisco-reputation.html

2023-09-26 08:41:15

#SocialMedia #TikTok #FacialRecognition #Privacy: "A viral TikTok account is doxing ordinary and otherwise anonymous people on the internet using off-the-shelf facial recognition technology, creating content and growing a following by taking advantage of a fundamental new truth: privacy is now essentially dead in public spaces.
The 90,000 follower-strong account typically picks targets who appeared in other viral videos, or people suggested to the account in the comments. Many of the account’s videos show the process: screenshotting the video of the target, cropping images of the face, running those photos through facial recognition software, and then revealing the person’s full name, social media profile, and sometimes employer to millions of people who have liked the videos. There’s an entire branch of content on TikTok in which creators show off their OSINT doxing skills—OSINT being open source intelligence, or information that is openly available online. But the vast majority of them do it with the explicit consent of the target. This account is doing the same, without the consent of the people they choose to dox. As a bizarre aside, the account appears to be run by a Taylor Swift fan, with many of the doxing videos including Swift’s music, and including videos of people at the Eras Tour."
https://www.404media.co/the-end-of-privacy-is-a-taylor-swift-fan-tiktok-account-armed-with-facial-recognition-tech/

2023-09-24 10:21:10

#USA #DigitalGovernment #eGovernment: "Currently, only two percent of government forms are digitized, 45 percent of websites have not been designed to work on mobile devices, and 60 percent of websites are not fully usable by those who use assistive technologies. When people search online for information and services from our government, they get too many results with confusing answers and it’s not clear what they should do next. This is unacceptable. We can and must do better.
Today, OMB is releasing new policy guidance to agencies on Delivering a Digital-First Public Experience (M-23-22), which will transform the way Federal government communicates with the American people digitally to ensure it is providing information that is easy to use, trustworthy, and accessible. This digital framework for government includes a variety of actions and standards to help Federal agencies design, develop, and deliver modern websites and digital services. The guidance will make it seamless for the public to obtain government information and services online, and help agencies fully implement the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (IDEA).
Today and over the coming years, this Digital Experience (DX) guidance will drive progress across government to ensure that you will:"
https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/briefing-room/2023/09/22/why-the-american-people-deserve-a-digital-government/

2023-09-23 01:46:04

#EU #DigitalLiteracy #MediaLiteracy: "This commissioned research report is a continuation of the Media Literacy Case for Educators project, which was introduced in April 2023 in the article: Media Literacy Case for Educators: Empowering Educators to Lead Media Literacy Initiatives in Europe and referenced in: An Assessment of the Needs of Educators and Youth in Europe for a Digital and Media Literacy Education Intervention.Two phases of exploration have been conducted, involving two rounds of desk research. The result of the second phase can be seen in the annotated bibliography included at the end of this report. Recommendations which resulted from the research include: combine methods and make learning fun; use evaluation and other key elements in the curriculum. Additional observations and considerations which require further exploration include: give attention to teachers’ and educators’ skills; and develop “patchwork blankets” and alliances."
https://tacticaltech.org/news/project-launches/mlce_research_report/

2023-09-23 01:42:03

#UK #OSB #Surveillance #Encryption #Privacy #Signal #Messaging: "“We’re not about political stunts, so we’re not going to just pick up our toys and go home to, like, show the bad U.K. they’re being mean,” she said. “We’re really worried about people in the U.K. who would live under a surveillance regime like the one that seems to be teased by the Home Office and others in the U.K.”
Whittaker noted that Signal takes a number of steps to ensure its users remain anonymous regardless of the laws and regulations in their particular country. Asked onstage what data Signal’s handed over in the instances that it’s received search warrants, Whittaker said that it’s been limited to the phone number registered to a Signal account and the last time a user accessed their account."
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/21/meredith-whittaker-reaffirms-that-signal-would-leave-u-k-if-forced-by-privacy-bill/?tpcc=tcplustwitter

2023-09-23 01:40:41

#Chile #Allende #Cybersyn #Cybernetics: "“Many of the American observers couldn’t believe that a relatively underdeveloped country like Chile could pull off something like this; some were even busy writing letters to the editor denouncing Cybersyn’s existence as what today we would call ‘fake news.’” Morozov tells me. “And yet it was real, it was ahead of its time, and it was an organic fit to the needs of the country’s economic development.”
And it worked. In one famous example, a strike organized by truck owners opposed to Allende sought to grind the economy to a halt, and Cybersyn helped feed the government data necessary to work around it — without resorting to crushing the strike. Allende’s vision for socialism was different from the Soviet strain; he wanted to preserve Chile’s democratic institutions, and transition to public-owned institutions peacefully. And he saw Cybersyn as a way to help achieve that.
In the end, Allende’s government was the one that was crushed. Backed by Nixon, Pinochet seized power, sending tanks and troops into Santiago. Salvador Allende took his own life, and thousands of his supporters were rounded up, imprisoned and killed. And Cybersyn, which had barely begun to operate — the ops room was still considered a prototype — was destroyed."
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-09-21/column-merchant-cybersyn-chile-tech-utopia-experiment

2023-09-23 01:21:02

- reply

@npub1mnp…k9zl Pois, é um discurso que foge sempre com o rabo à seringa quando a coisa dá para o torto... ;)

2023-09-23 01:11:02

- reply

E já agora: tenham a honestidade de não enterrar a cabeça na areia e encarar de frente as questões das alterações climáticas e da transição energética - campos onde, apesar da propaganda governamental, Portugal ainda tem mesmo muito que fazer.

2023-09-23 01:10:45

É muito giro vir para as redes sociais arrotar postas de pescada sobre o crescimento ininterrupto da carga fiscal em Portugal. Não é nada giro essas pessoas ocultarem a sua receita de pacotilha para controlar o problema da dívida pública: privatizar tudo o que se mexe. Assim não!
Se não fosse os apoios do Estado, a taxa de risco de pobreza seria muito, mesmo muito superior. Todos os dados oriundos de instituições fidedignas o indicam.
Os salários em Portugal são baixos porque a produtividade é pouca e os empresários vivem à conta de rendas do Estado e não possuem nem qualificações nem visão estratégica para pensar a médio prazo.
Com isto não quero dizer que o Estado não seja mal gerido ou que os governos não têm sido sucessivamente infestados por gente manifestamente incompetente e/ou corrupta. Muito pelo contrário!
Mas alegar que a maior parte dos problemas dos portugueses estão nos impostos elevados é conversa para enganar tótós. Os salários são baixos porque a base económica é fraca e atrasada. E aos chicos-espertos da Iniciativa Liberal cuja missão é enganar tótós que não percebem patavina de economia política: tentem mas é resolver o problema da incompetência da gestão da coisa pública e não passar pelos pingos da chuva sobre o que implica de facto fazer política e governar.
É que diminuir impostos não é um programa de governo. É quanto muito uma receita para arrasar o tecido social e condenar à miséria material e intelectual nos próximos 50 a 100 anos. Na verdade, pode-se até alegar que uma medida como essa é o exemplo máximo de anti-política.
Pensem em soluções para investir no crescimento da produtividade como aumentar as qualificações e o nível de formação dos trabalhadores portugueses, apetrechar e modernizar as bibliotecas públicas e universitárias, garantir a qualidade do ensino público, aumentar as despesas em Investigação e Desenvolvimento, apostar na renovação dos quadros das universidades.

2023-09-20 19:47:13

#Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Cybersecurity #Cybercrime: "Billionaire Mark Cuban has long been a major supporter of cryptocurrencies, promoting Bitcoin as a better investment than gold and criticizing security regulators’ approach to reigning in the industry. Now, he’s been hit with a nearly $1 million loss after falling victim to a phishing scam.
The substantial theft was first spotted by an anonymous blockchain watcher on social media, who noticed that Cuban’s crypto wallet was being drained of all its funds on Friday. “Lmao, did Mark Cuban's wallet just get drained? Wallet inactive for 160 days and all assets just moved,” said WazzCrypto in a tweet with an attached screenshot of Cuban’s wallet activity. The losses amounted to roughly $870,000, according to blockchain data from the attacker’s crypto address."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5ywkw/billionaire-crypto-promoter-mark-cuban-lost-nearly-dollar1m-in-common-scam

2023-09-17 10:39:32

#Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #FTX #Scams: "Both parents have distinguished careers that long precede their son’s alleged fraud. They met in the 1980s at Stanford University, where they taught at the law school for more than three decades, living on campus and raising two sons. Bankman, an expert on taxes, is renowned for his work making the US tax code friendlier to lower-income citizens. Fried, an authority on legal ethics, was prominent in progressive political circles.
At the time the ad aired, critics were warning that FTX was luring naive investors with extremely risky financial instruments that were mostly banned in the US. Those investors would see their money vanish when the funds were diverted, without their knowledge, to a hedge fund that Bankman-Fried also owned. FTX collapsed and filed for bankruptcy in November 2022."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-09-14/sam-bankman-fried-s-parents-did-they-enable-ftx-s-rise

2023-09-15 07:59:20

#EU #AI #GenerativeAI #GPAI #AIAct: "As the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act enters its final phase of negotiations, AlgorithmWatch publishes key policy proposals for governing General Purpose AI (GPAI) and Generative AI (GenAI). The recommendations were developed with substantive input by leading experts in the field.
The paper highlights actionable suggestions that should be considered during the ongoing trilogue negotiations.
The policy briefing delves into five critical areas for governing GPAI and GenAI:"
https://algorithmwatch.org/en/ai-act-general-purpose-ai/

2023-09-13 08:34:42

#TechnicalWriting #Cybersecurity #MFA: "Technical writers simplify complex information so that anyone can understand it. The best tech writers partner with project, product, marketing, engineering, and customer support teams to create strategies and content that help customers and internal teams succeed. That’s exactly what Tammy Rahn, content architect at Salesforce, did for the MFA initiative.
In her time at Salesforce, Rahn learned to connect internal silos. No matter the roles, teams, or organizational structures, she used content as a foundation to align stakeholders and drive tasks forward. From the start of the MFA program, she aligned teams around a centralized content strategy – including a blueprint for how to inspire and guide customers to adopt MFA.
Investing in quality technical writers can help your company break down silos. This ensures that employees across departments are able to understand the task — and how to explain the benefits to customers."
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/technical-writer-technology-adoption/

2023-09-11 12:19:35

#Decentralization #TechnologicalResistance #Encryption #P2P: "This book brings together voices from various fields of intellectual inquiry, based on the idea that technological, legal and societal aspects of the information sphere are interlinked and co-dependent from each other. In order to tackle the existing gap in shared semantics, this glossary converges the efforts of experts from various disciplines to build a shared vocabulary on the social, technical, economic, political aspects of decentralised, distributed or sovereign technologies: artefacts which seek to challenge the techno-social status quo by, for example, circumventing law enforcement, resisting surveillance, or being participative.
The idea ofthis glossary arose from the need for a workable, flexible and multidisciplinary resource for terminological clarity, which reflects instead of denying complexity. Situating the terms emerging through technology development in the wider context of multidisciplinary scientific, policy and political discourses, this glossary provides a conceptual toolkit for the study of the various political, economic, legal and technical struggles that decentralised, encryption-based, peer-to-peer technologies bring about and go through.
Choosing relevant technology-related terms and understanding them is to investigate their affordances within a given ecosystem of actors, discourses and systems of incentives. This requires an interdisciplinary, multi-layered approach that is attentive to the interlinkages between technological design nuances and socio-political, economic implications."
https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/log-out-a-glossary-of-technological-resistance-and-decentralization/

2023-09-11 10:07:46

#AI #GenerativeAI #Copyright #IP: "On Thursday, Microsoft announced that it will provide legal protection for customers who are sued for copyright infringement over content generated by the company's AI systems. This new policy, called the Copilot Copyright Commitment, is an expansion of Microsoft's existing intellectual property indemnification coverage, Reuters reports.
Microsoft's announcement comes as generative AI tools like ChatGPT have raised concerns about reproducing copyrighted material without proper attribution. Microsoft has heavily invested in AI through products like GitHub Copilot and Bing Chat that can generate original code, text, and images on demand. Its AI models have gained these capabilities by scraping publicly available data off of the Internet without seeking express permission from copyright holders."
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/microsoft-offers-legal-protection-for-ai-copyright-infringement-challenges/

2023-09-11 10:06:17

#DigitalEconomy #DigitalColonialism #VC #SiliconValley: "As countries in the Global South have long been plundered for labor and precious natural resources, today’s digital economy is extracting data from its citizens. And as the new dirty jobs of the digital economy are outsourced to the Global South—for instance, content moderators and data labelers in Kenya and the Philippines scouring the dregs of social media to protect the public from extreme and graphic material—we are witnessing the construction of a new age of digital sweatshops, where the most dangerous work is offshored to be performed by workers with the fewest protections.
The tech industry likes to present itself as presiding over a new industrial revolution that will change the world forever. It’s a more apt comparison than they might realize. As Dr. Onoho’Omhen Ebhohimhen of the Nigeria Labour Congress explained to us, noting that the effects of the digital economy, such as algorithmic management of workers, “is akin to reproducing the first Industrial Revolution, where workers were bonded and locked up, worked for 20 hours or more in a day, and had no right to a family life.”
Yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. Digital innovation can disrupt economies in favor of collaborative, solidarity-based forms of decent and quality work, where all can flourish. So, how might we democratize the digital economy so workers have agency and are able to shape the future alongside the technologists and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley?"
https://ssir.org/articles/entry/building_the_future_of_work_we_want

2023-09-11 09:51:01

#AI #GenerativeAI #ChatGPT #Hallucinations: "Although chatbots such as ChatGPT can facilitate cost-effective text generation and editing, factually incorrect responses (hallucinations) limit their utility. This study evaluates one particular type of hallucination: fabricated bibliographic citations that do not represent actual scholarly works. We used ChatGPT-3.5 and ChatGPT-4 to produce short literature reviews on 42 multidisciplinary topics, compiling data on the 636 bibliographic citations (references) found in the 84 papers. We then searched multiple databases and websites to determine the prevalence of fabricated citations, to identify errors in the citations to non-fabricated papers, and to evaluate adherence to APA citation format. Within this set of documents, 55% of the GPT-3.5 citations but just 18% of the GPT-4 citations are fabricated. Likewise, 43% of the real (non-fabricated) GPT-3.5 citations but just 24% of the real GPT-4 citations include substantive citation errors. Although GPT-4 is a major improvement over GPT-3.5, problems remain."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-41032-5

2023-09-11 09:12:10

#Microsoft #AI #GenerativeAI #Water #WaterConsumption: "In its latest environmental report, Microsoft disclosed that its global water consumption spiked 34% from 2021 to 2022 (to nearly 1.7 billion gallons, or more than 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools), a sharp increase compared to previous years that outside researchers tie to its AI research.
“It’s fair to say the majority of the growth is due to AI,” including “its heavy investment in generative AI and partnership with OpenAI,” said Shaolei Ren, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside who has been trying to calculate the environmental impact of generative AI products such as ChatGPT.
In a paper due to be published later this year, Ren’s team estimates ChatGPT gulps up 500 milliliters of water (close to what’s in a 16-ounce water bottle) every time you ask it a series of between 5 to 50 prompts or questions. The range varies depending on where its servers are located and the season. The estimate includes indirect water usage that the companies don’t measure — such as to cool power plants that supply the data centers with electricity."
https://fortune.com/2023/09/09/ai-chatgpt-usage-fuels-spike-in-microsoft-water-consumption/

2023-09-10 16:22:53

Se o governo deste país fosse realmente SOCIALISTA, haveria certamente muito maior investimento PÚBLICO num bem PÚBLICO como a CIÊNCIA. É preciso ser muito estúpido e/ou teimoso para não admitir isso...
#Portugal #Ciência #UE: "Investimento público de Portugal em I&D em 2022 foi equivalente a 0,34% do PIB, traduzindo um declínio de 0,1 pontos percentuais face a 2012. No "ranking" da UE só há seis países com uma percentagem inferior.
Portugal figura na cauda da União Europeia (UE) no que toca ao investimento público em investigação e desenvolvimento (I&D), com o gasto por habitante a ser 70,5% inferior à média dos 27."
https://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/economia/detalhe/portugal-investe-70-menos-do-que-a-media-da-ue-em-investigacao-e-desenvolvimento

2023-09-10 12:24:30

RT @mario_gug
false arrests, AI discrimination in health care, education, and employment. I am encouraged to see more media organizations using their platforms to show the present dangers of AI and highlighting real people being impacted and pushing back
https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/6310661/joy-buolamwini-ai/

2023-09-10 12:23:30

- reply

"Journalists in America investigating this matter report that the real concern of advertisers is Musk’s own lurid tweeting, making them nervous of association with what such an unpredictable character might say through the medium of his own product.
As if to confirm the validity of such concerns, Musk last week on Twitter/X followed up a user who quoted the toxic conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (author of the claim that the shootings of children at the Sandy Hook school was a “hoax” involving actors) that the ADL is “the most pro-Hitler organisation I’ve ever seen”. Musk added: “The ADL, because they are so aggressive in their demands to ban social media accounts for even minor infractions, are ironically the biggest generators of anti-Semitism on this platform!”
As Yair Rosenberg wrote in The Atlantic: “Abuse of Jews on his site, he argued, is the consequence of Jews complaining about the abuse. (Chronology does not appear to be his strong suit).” Greenblatt, asked whether he thought Musk was espousing antisemitism himself, responded that the site’s owner was “engaging with users who are blatantly and boldly doing so, and that’s very problematic. I would say that blaming the Jews or the ADL for antisemitism also . . . evokes the age-old tropes that we work so hard to fight.”"
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/77706ee6-4f42-11ee-a041-9c691fc04ff2

2023-09-10 12:19:16

#SocialMedia #Twitter #X #Musk: "In Musk's reckoning, the ADL singlehandedly vaporized roughly $4 billion in X's "value," and that $4 billion accounts for around 10% of the entire decline in the franchise's worth. That formula puts the total fall at $40 billion. Since Musk and partners paid $44 billion including debt, he's implying that the platform would now change hands for $4 billion (the $44 billion purchase price minus the $40 billion in "value destruction"), for a drop of 90%. In effect, he's saying that the $31 billion he and his partners invested in equity is totally gone, and a big portion of the debt from provided by the cream of Wall Street sits far underwater.
Does Elon Musk really believe that X is now worth $4 billion, as his scorching post suggests? Maybe not. But he's just inflicted still another battering on his already beleaguered brand that will further undermine its standing in the eyes of advertisers. His view may be that it's acceptable to exaggerate the pain and throw around numbers when you're the victim, when it's somebody else's fault. If X indeed proves a financial cataclysm, people are likely to forget the excuses, and examine the careening missteps from its mercurial sole proprietor."
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/according-elon-musk-own-math-204413573.html

2023-09-10 12:14:26

#Google #AdTracking #Privacy #DataProtection #FLoC #Cookies: "Don't let Chrome's big redesign distract you from the fact that Chrome's invasive new ad platform, ridiculously branded the "Privacy Sandbox," is also getting a widespread rollout in Chrome today. If you haven't been following this, this feature will track the web pages you visit and generate a list of advertising topics that it will share with web pages whenever they ask, and it's built directly into the Chrome browser. It's been in the news previously as "FLoC" and then the "Topics API," and despite widespread opposition from just about every non-advertiser in the world, Google owns Chrome and is one of the world's biggest advertising companies, so this is being railroaded into the production builds.
Google seemingly knows this won't be popular. Unlike the glitzy front-page Google blog post that the redesign got, the big ad platform launch announcement is tucked away on the privacysandbox.com page. The blog post says the ad platform is hitting "general availability" today, meaning it has rolled out to most Chrome users. This has been a long time coming, with the APIs rolling out about a month ago and a million incremental steps in the beta and dev builds, but now the deed is finally done."
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-opposed-ad-platform-the-privacy-sandbox-launches-in-chrome/

2023-09-10 09:24:07

RT @jasonhickel
Since 2020, two-thirds of all new wealth we have collectively produced has been captured by the richest 1%.
Source: https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621477/bp-survival-of-the-richest-160123-en.pdf

2023-09-05 08:18:05

#Cybersecurity #Encryption #Signal #Messaging #AI #Privacy #Surveillance: "Is Signal using Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
Signal does use one small machine learning model which is actually part of our media editing suite of tools. It allows people to click a button to automatically makes faces unrecognizable in a photo; it runs locally on your phone. For example, if you take a photo of a party where you don’t know everyone, and you don’t have consent to share facial biometric data, you can click a button and this model will help you recognize faces and blur them so you can ensure privacy. That’s a nice and useful application of AI and it doesn’t send data to an app company.
What, then, is the problem with AI?
When AI systems are used, they are usually used for surveillance. They profile people’s faces and create data about whose face that is or what kind of person that face indicates. It’s used for ratings or for other purposes, which are surveillance in themselves. To create these AI systems, you first have to have huge amounts of data to train and inform those systems so they can be calibrated. The metastasis of AI as a kind of dominant and very hyped form of technology is antithetical to ensuring real privacy. It entrenches and expands the business model of surveillance, because its insatiable demand for data will naturally lead to more surveillance, more collection and generation of data."
https://schweizermonat.ch/when-ai-systems-are-used-they-are-usually-used-for-surveillance/#

2023-09-04 18:24:12

Segundo dia do #MEOKalorama: Belle & Sebastian, John Talabot, Arca e Aphex Twin.
Já tinha visto Arca no Primavera Sound Los Angeles no ano passado, mas valeu a pena ver de novo - ainda que com um público menos animado, uma actuação menos incendiária e um som mais baixo.
Quanto ao resto, este segundo dia foi mesmo mmmmuuuiiittto bom. Cartaz de nível mundial. Quem diria que ira um dia ver um concerto de Aphex Twin como cabeça de cartaz de um festival de música em Lisboa?
Gostei muito da organização, provavelmente o festival mais bem organizado a que já fui (o que não quer dizer nada, pois também não costumo ir a muitos...). Só é pena o terreno do Parque da Bela Vista ser horrível...
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/111/008/274/771/317/499/original/41460334b875b2aa.jpeg

2023-09-04 18:02:15

Now that's a truly SOCIALIST & LEFT political program for the 21st century. Unfortunately, most of the pseudo left commentariat and political forces are only interested in discussing the sex of angels while the world burns and capitalism provokes greater depression worldwide.
#Ecosocialism #AnarchoCommunism #PublicGoods #Capitalism #Environmentalism: "Kropotkin’s argument stands today. It would not take much, as a share of total global productive capacity, to ensure decent lives for everyone on the planet. But with the reality of the ecological crisis, we must also face a second challenge, one that Kropotkin could not appreciate in the nineteenth century: to achieve well-being for all while at the same time reducing aggregate use of energy and materials (specifically in the core) to enable sufficiently rapid decarbonization and to bring the world economy back within planetary boundaries. Technological innovation and efficiency improvements are crucial to this, but high-income countries also need to scale down less-necessary forms of production in order to reduce excess energy and material use directly.
If capitalism has always been unable to achieve the former goal (well-being for all), it most certainly cannot achieve the latter. It is a structural impossibility, as it runs against the core logic of the capitalist economy, which is to increase aggregate production indefinitely, to maintain the conditions for perpetual accumulation.
It is clear what needs to be done: we must achieve democratic control over finance and production, as Kropotkin argued, and now organize it around the double goal of well-being and ecology. This requires that we distinguish, as Kropotkin did, between the socially necessary production that clearly needs to increase for social progress, and the destructive and less-necessary forms of production that urgently need to be scaled down. This is the revolutionary world-historical objective that faces our generation."
https://monthlyreview.org/2023/09/01/the-double-objective-of-democratic-ecosocialism/

2023-09-03 10:20:44

#BigTech #Billionares #SiliconValley #Technocrats: "I call them the Technocrats, in recognition of the influence of the technocracy movement, founded in the 1930s by Elon Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman. The Technocrats make up a kind of interlocking directorate of Silicon Valley, each investing in or sitting on the boards of the others’ companies. Their vast digital domain controls your personal information; affects how billions of people live, work, and love; and sows online chaos, inciting mob violence and sparking runs on stocks. These four men have long been regarded as technologically progressive heroes, but they are actually part of a broader antidemocratic, authoritarian turn within the tech world, deeply invested in preserving the status quo and in keeping their market-leadership positions or near-monopolies—and their multi-billion-dollar fortunes secure from higher taxes. (“Competition is for suckers,” Thiel once posited.)
Indeed, they are American oligarchs, controlling online access for billions of users on Facebook, Twitter, Threads, Instagram, and WhatsApp, including 80 percent of the US population. Moreover, from the outside, they appear to be more interested in replacing our current reality—and our economic system, imperfect as it is—with something far more opaque, concentrated, and unaccountable, which, if it comes to pass, they will control."
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/08/musk-thiel-zuckerberg-andreessen-alternate-autocratic-reality

2023-09-01 08:37:41

#Cybersecurity #Phishing #Scams #Montenegro: "“Howdy Joseph,” the July email I got from Zdravko Krivokapić, who was the Prime Minister of Montenegro until last year, read.
Obviously, this wasn’t actually Krivokapić emailing me. Instead, it was a hacker who had gained access to what seemed to be Krivokapić’s personal Gmail account. The hackers proceeded to send me a mass of alleged documents from the government of Montenegro, including some related to the country’s Ministry of Finance. Alongside those, the hacker also sent photos of cash, flashy watches, and weapons, which appear to be from the hacker’s own collection and not the former Prime Minister’s.
Beyond wanting to flex their access to Krivokapić’s account, the hacker said they might use the compromised email to then target other services, using the former Prime Minster’s identity as a cover."
https://www.404media.co/buying-and-selling-hacked-government-emails-edrs-discord-snapchat-facebook-tiktok/

2023-09-01 08:35:17

#Australia #Africa #Cybersecurity #Surveillance: "- Telstra purchased Fiji-based Digicel Pacific in July 2022, backed with more than $2 billion in Australian government financing
- For-profit surveillance companies market their services to governments as a way to track criminals and terrorists, but the services have been abused in order to spy on journalists, activists, and political opponents
- The misuse of Digicel Pacific dates back to before Telstra's purchase of the network"
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-01/australia-owned-pacific-mobile-network-likely-exploited-by-spies/102784160?utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=twitter&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web

2023-09-01 08:32:51

#AI #GenerativeAI #Luddites #Copyright #IP: "The point here is not to “well, actually” Stephen goddamned King, or to try to embarrass him, but to point out why it’s so important that we understand the distinction between the myth of the Luddites — ignoramuses who smashed machines because they didn’t understand them — and the true Luddites: skilled, proud cloth workers who understood all too well how machinery was being deployed against them, and fought back. And the sentiment that generative AI is somehow inevitable is hardly relegated to bestselling novelists; it may be the predominant attitude I run into in conversations about the technology.
The reason that, 200 years later, so many creative workers are angry and unnerved by AI is not that they fear it will become so good, so powerful that they may as well up and quit writing, drawing, or acting. It’s that, like the Luddites, they are painfully aware how bosses will use AI against them. To most working authors (and artists, screenwriters, illustrators, and so on) the fear over AI is not philosophical; it is economic, and it is existential."
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-08-31/column-stephen-king-i-love-you-but-youre-wrong-about-the-luddites-and-technological-progress

2023-09-01 08:28:04

#UK #OSB #Encryption #Surveillance #Cybersecurity: "It’s a 21st-century form of prior restraint, violating the very essence of free speech. It’s a death knell for end-to-end encryption, and with it, every internet user’s right to privacy.
Private communication is a fundamental human right, and in the online world, the best tool we have to defend this right is end-to-end encryption. It ensures that governments, tech companies, social media platforms, and other groups cannot view or access our private messages, the pictures we share with family and friends, or our bank account details. This is a particularly vital protection for the most vulnerable in society, such as children seeking relief from abuse or human rights defenders working in hostile environments."
https://www.thedailybeast.com/crackdowns-on-encrypted-messaging-dont-help-the-children

2023-09-01 08:26:15

#Cybersecurity #Apple #Privacy #CSAM #Surveillance #iCloud: "“Child sexual abuse material is abhorrent and we are committed to breaking the chain of coercion and influence that makes children susceptible to it,” Erik Neuenschwander, Apple's director of user privacy and child safety, wrote in the company's response to Heat Initiative. He added, though, that after collaborating with an array of privacy and security researchers, digital rights groups, and child safety advocates, the company concluded that it could not proceed with development of a CSAM-scanning mechanism, even one built specifically to preserve privacy.
“Scanning every user’s privately stored iCloud data would create new threat vectors for data thieves to find and exploit," Neuenschwander wrote. "It would also inject the potential for a slippery slope of unintended consequences. Scanning for one type of content, for instance, opens the door for bulk surveillance and could create a desire to search other encrypted messaging systems across content types.”"
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-csam-scanning-heat-initiative-letter/

2023-09-01 08:23:43

RT @BigMeanInternet
The uniquely evil thing about American chattel slavery was the breeding industry, which is too awful to teach about and so we don't and it doesn't even come up in these discussions
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/08/was-american-slavery-uniquely-evil-wrong-question.html

2023-09-01 08:22:12

"The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the agency which maintains the New York City subway, says it has disabled a system that a 404 Media investigation found could allow stalkers or other third parties to follow specific travelers’ movements through the subway system just by entering their credit card number.
“This feature was meant to help our customers who want access to their tap-and-go trip histories, both paid and free, without having to create an OMNY account. As part of the MTA’s ongoing commitment to customer privacy, we have disabled this feature while we evaluate other ways to serve these customers,” MTA spokesperson Eugene Resnick told 404 Media in a statement on Thursday."
https://www.404media.co/mta-will-disable-omny-trip-history-feature-abuse/

2023-08-31 09:29:45

#Education #Teens #SocialMedia: "I’m a believer that as a parent, and for all the parents out there, that our biggest responsibility is to socialize young people into the world. And that socialization doesn’t happen on a certain birthday, that socialization doesn’t happen overnight. That is a constant negotiation that’s about helping young people make mistakes and learn from them. And your goal is to hopefully end up with bruises, not broken bones, let alone something worse. But it’s about this constant working and negotiation.
So first, the way that I always approach problems is going back historically. So one of my favorites is to think back about how we created compulsory high school in the United States. This is actually a pretty modern invention. It was first proposed in the 1880s by moral reformers. Moral reformers were very concerned that young people as they were hitting teenage years were being corrupted by older folks. And so they wanted to create a bubble of innocence for young people as long as possible. The idea was that high school as a compulsory requirement would be a way to protect them from the sins of the older population.
They got nowhere in the 1880s, but in the 1920s, labor unions started panicking that there was not enough jobs available for older men. It was all about men. And so they ended up teaming up with moral reformers to create compulsory high school as a way of shielding young people from the adult world in order to protect the available jobs. And this is sort of a weird thing to think about. You’re like, oh, it turns out that high school is jail in the United States by design."
https://publicinfrastructure.org/podcast/86-danah-boyd/

2023-08-30 23:36:03

Passar férias num hotel em Portugal deve ser das coisas mais "gato por lebre" do momento em todo o mundo. Quero dizer, o clima é muito bom, a gastronomia é formidável, as opções a nível de restauração de qualidade nunca foram tão grandes.
Mas de resto, o sistema de transportes públicos é pouco melhor que miserável, os jardins e parques urbanos são muito poucos ou nenhuns (especialmente em Lisboa), a desertificação do interior é um facto e o comércio continua a ser muito fraco.
A somar a isto tudo, a arquitectura é em regra geral medíocre (com prédios decrépitos em tudo quanto é esquina) e o planeamento urbano é praticamente inexistente. Em suma, com preços de alojamento tão caros, é por demais evidente que o turismo em Portugal está sobrevalorizado.

2023-08-27 11:11:11

#USA #KOSA #Censorship: "The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill that allows for a wide range of government penalties for online speech, could soon be passed by Congress. If that happens, the access we have to information may be forever changed. KOSA will make state prosecutors and federal bureaucrats the final arbiters of online content moderation in the U.S.
KOSA is fundamentally a censorship bill. Politicians are justifying it by harping on something we all know—that there’s content online that’s inappropriate for kids. But instead of letting tricky questions about what online content is appropriate at what age be decided by parents and families, politicians are stepping in to override us."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/us-government-about-control-speech-online-protect-kids

2023-08-27 11:02:23

#EU #DSA #SocialMedia #Google #Meta #Disinformation: "As a deadline for compliance with the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) passed on Friday, Free Press found that the major platforms’ policies have yet to fully align with the law’s requirements, potentially exposing companies like Google and Meta to tens of billions of dollars in EU fines.
The DSA, adopted in 2022, requires greater transparency and accountability from major platform companies including Google, Meta, TikTok and Twitter (X). Under the DSA, platforms must act “expeditiously” to stop the spread of harmful content; give users information about how ads are targeting them; and offer users clear instructions on how to opt out of such targeting. Platforms must also stop placing targeted ads that rely on sensitive personal data, including a user’s sexual preferences, health information, political beliefs and religion; and be more transparent about their operations — sharing algorithmic information with researchers and disclosing their content-moderation practices in annual reports.
A platform company that fails to comply with these DSA requirements by the EU’s Aug. 25 deadline could be fined up to six percent of its annual global revenue — with repeat offenders facing the prospect of a complete ban from operating in Europe."
https://www.freepress.net/news/press-releases/major-tech-platforms-fall-short-compliance-deadline-eus-new-rules-passes

2023-08-27 10:58:23

#AI #GenerativeAI #Copyright #IP: "- Bring opt-out mechanisms to platforms where the data is shared. Buried in user agreements are clauses that give these platforms rights to train AI systems with users’ images (or text). If users aren’t comfortable with a platform’s policy on AI, they ought to be informed and able to opt out without consequence.
- Acknowledge that people generate images – not AI. Every AI-generated artwork is a product of some human intention, and subsequent interaction, with a tool to manifest that intention. Attributing authorship to the tool, rather than attributing it to an interaction of users, tools, and data, wrongly shifts accountability to the tool instead of the humans who build and use them. Designers of these tools ought to be accountable for their decisions in building them. There are content moderation decisions already at work, such as the blurring or censorship of inappropriate images.
- Empower data consent. If users of a company’s tools or an open source model create a “dataset” of images by a particular human artist without permission, or include large numbers of an artist’s work in a larger dataset, then the designers of those tools or models should be held accountable. There is an obligation to provide clear assurance that consent has been obtained for the data used in training datasets: just as one would in any ethical research endeavor.
- Affirm data rights as well as copyrights. There are limits to copyright law, which has long been flawed and over-restrictive to creative reinterpretation – and assumes that the court system is equally accessible to everyone. Placing the focus on the users who create outputs with AI tools is akin to faulting drivers when a vehicle malfunctions. Individuals who make and share AI-generated work should not be afraid of prosecution if these tools infringe another artist’s copyright"
https://techpolicy.press/a-new-contract-for-artists-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/

2023-08-27 10:55:05

RT @mgeist
This sounds like a good cop/bad cop approach designed to distract from Bill C-18 mess and CRTC timeline. Meta didn’t ask for the meeting and didn’t change its position. Regs won’t fix deeply flawed law so they say they’re still exiting news in Canada.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-new-heritage-minister-holds-positive-talks-with-meta-executives-but/

2023-08-27 09:23:36

#EU #DSA #EC #BigTech #AI #ContentModeration #SocialMedia: "It’s one thing to come up with an ambitious rulebook. It’s another to successfully enforce it.
The content-moderation law has serious potential to bite. The law provides for stronger fines than its GDPR sister rulebook — 6 percent of companies’ annual revenue, compared with 4 percent. Led by the team that wrote the law — and knows it inside and out — the Commission will have broad enforcement powers, similar to antitrust investigators’, to oversee and ensure the compliance of the biggest tech firms. It will also receive extra yearly funding — an estimated €45 million for 2024 — funded through an annual levy from the Big Tech firms themselves.
The teams in Brussels will be backed by dozens of artificial intelligence and computer scientists at the Commission's European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency (ECAT). And the Commission will also cooperate with national EU digital regulators, including in Ireland, where most of the affected tech firms have their EU headquarters."
https://www.politico.eu/article/digital-services-act-dsa-online-content-law-europe-teeth-bite/

2023-08-27 09:19:29

#EU #Cybersecurity #Poland #Railways #Trains #Russia: "Polish intelligence services are investigating a hacking attack on the country's railways, Polish media say.
Hackers broke into railway frequencies to disrupt traffic in the north-west of the country overnight, the Polish Press Agency (PAP) reported on Saturday.
The signals were interspersed with recording of Russia's national anthem and a speech by President Vladimir Putin, the report says.
Poland is a major transit hub for Western weapons being sent to Ukraine."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66630260

2023-08-26 10:23:08

#Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Fintech: "A buzzy startup offering financial infrastructure to crypto companies has found itself bankrupt primarily because it can’t gain access to a physical crypto wallet with $38.9 million in it. The company also did not write down recovery phrases, locking itself out of the wallet forever in something it has called “The Wallet Event” to a bankruptcy judge.
Prime Trust pitches itself as a crypto fintech company designed to help other startups offer crypto retirement plans, know-your-customer interfaces, ensure liquidity, and a host of other services. It says it can help companies build crypto exchanges, payment platforms, and create stablecoins for its clients. The company has not had a good few months. In June, the state of Nevada filed to seize control of the company because it was near insolvency. It was then ordered to cease all operations by a federal judge because it allegedly used customers’ money to cover withdrawal requests from other companies."
https://www.404media.co/crypto-startup-prime-trust-files-for-bankruptcy-after-losing-password-to-38-9-million-crypto-wallet/

2023-08-26 10:18:51

"When Wolf first started appearing on rightwing media outlets in 2021, her posture was reticent, anything but defiant. She talked about having voted for Biden, stressed that she used to write for the New York Times and the Guardian and appear on MSNBC, described herself as a liberal “media darling”. But now, she said, rightwing shows like Tucker Carlson’s and Steve Bannon’s were the only ones courageous enough to give her a platform.
For their part, every time a fiery rightwing show had Wolf on as a guest, the host would indulge in a protracted, ornate windup listing all of her liberal credentials, and professing shock that they could possibly find themselves on the same side. “I never thought I would be talking to you except in a debate format,” Carlson said the first time he had Wolf on. Then, referring to a tweet in which Wolf said that she regretted voting for Joe Biden, he added, “I was struck by the bravery it must have taken you to write it – I’m sure you lost friends over it, and for doing this [show].” Wolf smiled wistfully and nodded, accepting the hero’s welcome.
When she appeared on the podcast hosted by one of Britain’s most vocal climate change deniers and far-right provocateurs, James Delingpole, he began by saying, “This is so unlikely … five years ago, the idea that you and I would be breaking bread … I sort of bracketed you with the other Naomi – you know, Naomi Klein, Naomi Wolf, what’s the difference?” (Insert silent scream from me.) He went on: “And now, here we are. I mean, I think we are allies in a much, much bigger war. And you’ve been fighting a really good fight, so congratulations.” Once again, she drank it in, playing her demure role on these awkward political first dates."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/26/naomi-klein-naomi-wolf-conspiracy-theories

2023-08-26 10:13:50

#Canada #C18 #Media #News #Journalism #BigTech #Google #Meta: "The Bill C-18 legislative process was marked by repeated warnings from the government that this was an urgent issue that justified its repeated efforts to cut off debate in order to fast track the bill into law before the summer break. In fact, in a late change, the bill was amended to provide that it would take effect with 180 days of royal assent, rather than the previously envisioned staged approach that would have resulted in a gradual development of regulations and implementation. That change has had enormous implications as the law can now take effect at any time but no later than December 19, 2023, which in turn led Meta to move to comply with the law immediately by blocking news links in Canada.
Notwithstanding the government’s plans, the CRTC apparently has other ideas. Yesterday it released its timeline for the development of the mandatory bargaining framework envisioned by the law. The proposed timeline has taken many by surprise as it suggests that mandatory bargaining may not begin until 2025. Given the bargaining process envisioned by the law (90 days to negotiate, 120 days for mediation, followed by arbitration), if the issue goes to arbitration it is unlikely that there will be any payments before 2026. Even if arbitration is avoided – Meta and Google would likely block all news links before that could happen – it will take at least 18 months for any agreements to be considered by the CRTC under the law."
https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/08/what-urgency-crtc-says-it-will-take-years-for-bill-c-18-media-bargaining-to-begin/

2023-08-26 10:12:11

#EU #DSA #Algorithms #ContentModeration: "The European Union’s Digital Services Act, which will eventually apply to any online service provider, will take effect for very large online platforms with more than 45 million users. Requirements under the law include a ban on targeting users with ads based on sensitive data, transparency requirements about how platforms’ algorithms work, and new liability obligations for illegal content such as hate speech and bans on deceptive design patterns.
The regulations are already shaping up to have a significant impact on how American tech companies treat user data in Europe. The DSA prohibits large tech companies from targeting advertising using sensitive data such as sexual orientation and entirely prohibits targeted ads against children.
Sensitive data as defined in the DSA refers to a broad range of attributes, including sexual orientation, religion, health history and political persuasion. “Just eliminating this type of data from the profiling of users for targeted advertising is going to be a very difficult task, regardless of the size of the company,” Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna, vice president for global privacy at the Future of Privacy Forum, told CyberScoop."
https://cyberscoop.com/eu-dsa-american-tech-firms/

2023-08-26 09:58:50

#CyberCrime #CyberSecurity #Surveillance #UN: "An international treaty on countering cybercrime is in danger of becoming an "expansive global surveillance pact" that will trample data privacy and human rights, activists warned UN delegates as they meet in New York City this week to hammer out an updated proposal.
The draft United Nations cybercrime treaty, which has been under negotiations for over two years, aims to define what online crime actually is and how member states can better work together to curb the growing global problem.
However, there's concern among many governments and civil rights advocates that that the treaty — originally proposed by Russia, with support from countries including China, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and Nicaragua — will pave the way for regimes to legalize surveillance across borders and criminalize online speech, seemingly with the support of the international community.
The treaty's sixth negotiating session began on Monday at the UN headquarters in Manhattan with delegates reviewing the draft through September 1."
https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/24/un_cybercrime_treaty/

2023-08-26 09:56:02

- reply

@npub15rq…f0yv here is the full article: https://archive.fo/osFJp

2023-08-25 08:35:59

RT @algorithmwatch
The EU’s new rules to govern #BigTech platforms officially kick in today. But will that really make the internet a safer place? #DSADay
Learn what to expect with our #DigitalServicesAct explainer. 💡
https://algorithmwatch.org/en/dsa-explained/

2023-08-25 08:34:45

#AI #GenerativeAI #Deepfakes #Google #Microsoft #BigTech: "When fans of Kaitlyn Siragusa, a popular 29-year-old internet personality known as Amouranth, want to watch her play video games, they will subscribe for $5 a month to her channel on Amazon.com Inc.’s Twitch. When they want to watch her perform adult content, they’ll subscribe for $15 a month for access to her explicit OnlyFans page.
And when they want to watch her do things she is not doing and has never done, for free, they’ll search on Google for so-called “deepfakes” — videos made with artificial intelligence that fabricate a lifelike simulation of a sexual act featuring the face of a real woman.
Siragusa, a frequent target of deepfake creators, said each time her staff finds something new on the search engine, they file a complaint with Google and fill out a form requesting the particular link be delisted, a time and energy draining process. “The problem,” Siragusa said, “is that it’s a constant battle.”
During the recent AI boom, the creation of nonconsensual pornographic deepfakes has surged, with the number of videos increasing ninefold since 2019, according to research from independent analyst Genevieve Oh. Nearly 150,000 videos, which have received 3.8 billion views in total, appeared across 30 sites in May 2023, according to Oh’s analysis. Some of the sites offer libraries of deepfake programming, featuring the faces of celebrities like Emma Watson or Taylor Swift grafted onto the bodies of porn performers. Others offer paying clients the opportunity to “nudify” women they know, such as classmates or colleagues."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-24/google-microsoft-tools-behind-surge-in-deepfake-ai-porn

2023-08-25 08:32:07

#HomeSecurity #Surveillance #Privacy: "Reconsidering whether you need a security camera after all may be the best thing you can do to protect your privacy and that of the people around you.
If that’s not an option, Guariglia says that before you buy a surveillance camera, you should find out whether your system of choice allows you to encrypt your data. This will prevent anyone—hackers, tech companies, or law enforcement—from accessing your data without the right credentials. You’ll also need to know whether encryption is set by default, is hard to turn on, or prevents you from using other features.
Guariglia also recommends you find out whether the camera manufacturer requires a warrant to share your data with law enforcement, and if an overly broad warrant will do the trick. Researching a company’s track record of protecting its users and pushing back against requests for their information can also be useful."
https://www.popsci.com/diy/home-security-camera-privacy-risk/

2023-08-25 08:30:13

#AI #GenerativeAI #Privacy #DataProtection: "Big Data, which uses massive datasets in similar ways, frequently implicates friends, relatives, and even distant acquaintances, which becomes extraordinarily worrisome when integrated into predictive policing or risk assessment algorithms. There is nothing people can do to prevent such invasions of privacy.
Generative AI heightens these networked privacy concerns. It compromises our ability to do “privacy work,” the methods and strategies we all employ to retain an acceptable level of privacy. And the outputs of generative AI are completely detached from their original source in ways previously unimaginable. It’s one thing to leak private text messages, and another for the entirety of Reddit to be used as grist for robot poetry and bad college papers. Information provided in one context can be entirely recontextualized and remixed, changing its meaning and violating what the philosopher Helen Nissenbaum calls “contextual integrity.” How can any one person prevent this?"
https://www.wired.com/story/you-are-not-responsible-for-your-own-online-privacy/

2023-08-23 08:24:38

#USA #RightToRepair #Biden: "NHTSA claimed in its initial letter that repair was somehow dangerous, and that wireless diagnostics posed an “unreasonable risk to motor vehicle safety” and would make cars less secure. This is exactly what car manufacturers argued in fear-mongering commercials that said ‘sexual predators’ would use wireless tools to stalk women in parking garages.
Tuesday, after widespread outrage from voters and consumer rights groups, NHTSA walked back its position in a letter to Massachusetts Assistant Attorney General Eric Haskell, stating that it had found a way to “advance our mutual interest in ensuring safe consumer choice for automotive repair and maintenance. NHTSA strongly supports the right to repair.”
The letter goes on to say that car manufacturers should sell devices to independent repair shops that do diagnostics “from within close physical proximity to the vehicle, without providing long-range remote access.” This was, of course, the plan all along, as no one was proposing that random repair shops be able to access people’s car from miles away."
https://www.404media.co/biden-administration-changes-mind-says-car-companies-shouldnt-ignore-overwhelmingly-popular-car-repair-law-anymore/

2023-08-23 08:14:51

#Media #News #Journalism #TechJournalism: "Hello, and welcome to 404 Media, a new digital media company created, owned, written, edited by four journalists who until very recently worked at VICE’s Motherboard. We’re glad you’re here, and we’re glad we’re here, too.
At 404 Media, we aspire to do society-shifting technology journalism, and to create a sustainable, responsible, reader-supported media business around it. We will report and publish stories that you will not find anywhere else, that we believe only we can do. We hope these stories will take over the internet, impact public policy, and expose bad actors. We will point out the absurd. We will be irreverent and have fun. We will also do very serious work. We hope that you will read these stories and want to send them to your group chat, or bring them up as conversation starters at parties.
We believe that if we do this journalism well enough, you, our readers, will be willing to subscribe because you think it’s important, because you think it should exist in the world, and because you feel you’re personally getting value from it."
https://www.404media.co/welcome-to-404-media/

2023-08-23 08:13:27

#USA #DataProtection #Privacy #DataBrokers #Doxxing: "This is the result of a secret weapon criminals are selling access to online that appears to tap into an especially powerful set of data: the target’s credit header. This is personal information that the credit bureaus Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion have on most adults in America via their credit cards. Through a complex web of agreements and purchases, that data trickles down from the credit bureaus to other companies who offer it to debt collectors, insurance companies, and law enforcement.
A 404 Media investigation has found that criminals have managed to tap into that data supply chain, in some cases by stealing former law enforcement officer’s identities, and are selling unfettered access to their criminal cohorts online. The tool 404 Media tested has also been used to gather information on high profile targets such as Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and even President Joe Biden, seemingly without restriction. 404 Media verified that although not always sensitive, at least some of that data is accurate.
The communities where this tool is advertised include chat rooms focused on swatting, where criminals place bogus calls that result in a heavily armed police response to a specific location; SIM swapping, in which hackers take over a victim’s phone number to then receive login codes and break into their online accounts; and physical violence, where criminals hire one another to rob, shoot, or assault their enemies and vandalize the target’s home. Overall, the tool offers exceptional power and requires little to no technical sophistication to obtain a victim’s sensitive data. Worse yet, it is exceedingly difficult for a user to opt out, and this data may be available even for people who have otherwise been careful with distributing their personal information, and who have taken steps to have their details scrubbed from other data brokers."
https://www.404media.co/the-secret-weapon-hackers-can-use-to-dox-nearly-anyone-in-america-for-15-tlo-usinfosearch-transunion/

2023-08-22 09:11:27

#USA #SocialMedia #TikTok #China: "The document, nearly 100 pages long, is designated as a confidential attorneys’ draft and contains comment exchanges between lawyers for ByteDance and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a group of federal agencies that investigates foreign investment in business deals that could threaten national interests.
The draft agreement, as it was being negotiated at the time, would give government agencies like the DOJ or the DOD the authority to:
- Examine TikTok’s U.S. facilities, records, equipment and servers with minimal or no notice,
- Block changes to the app’s U.S. terms of service, moderation policies and privacy policy,
- Veto the hiring of any executive involved in leading TikTok’s U.S. Data Security org,
- Order TikTok and ByteDance to pay for and subject themselves to various audits, assessments and other reports on the security of TikTok’s U.S. functions, and,
- In some circumstances, require ByteDance to temporarily stop TikTok from functioning in the United States.
The draft agreement would make TikTok’s U.S. operations subject to extensive supervision by an array of independent investigative bodies, including a third-party monitor, a third-party auditor, a cybersecurity auditor and a source code inspector. It would also force TikTok U.S. to exclude ByteDance leaders from certain security-related decision making, and instead rely on an executive security committee that would operate in secrecy from ByteDance. Members of this committee would be responsible first for protecting the national security of the United States, as defined by the Executive Branch, and only then for making the company money."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/08/21/draft-tiktok-cfius-agreement/?sh=20ebf992112a

2023-08-22 09:00:56

#Cars #RoadSafety #AVs #SelfDrivingCars: "A recent tweet from Matt Farah got the Jalopnik staff thinking about this. A system that’s 99.9-percent reliable sounds nearly perfect, but in reality, that 0.1-percent error rate is enormous.
So how good does a fully autonomous vehicle need to be in order to be safer than a human driver? As Jalopnik’s resident mathematician, figuring this out fell to me — and to data pulled from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
According to NHTSA, Americans drove 2,903,622,000,000 miles in 2021. That’s nearly three trillion miles, many of which were likely the sort of boring, uneventful highway driving where current Level 2 driver-assistance systems excel. American human drivers crashed 5,250,837 times in 2021 — once every 552,983 miles traveled.
Here’s how the numbers break down for human drivers in America:"
https://jalopnik.com/self-driving-car-vs-human-99-percent-safe-crash-data-1850170268

2023-08-22 08:26:54

#Canada #Meta #News #Journalism #ClimateChange #Fires: "Fires have been burning in virtually every province and territory throughout the summer, with different regions getting hit worse at different times. Right now, the devastation is being felt most acutely in the Northwest Territories and British Columbia. The Northern city of Yellowknife, which is home to about 20,000 people, was just evacuated and Kelowna is under a state of emergency with some of its residents being evacuated too.
But as people are trying to get essential information from government and public safety officials, Meta’s news ban is getting in the way. I never thought it was good that public institutions became so dependent on social media for public communication, but the reality was that people were on them, so governments followed to ensure important messaging could reach their citizens. Now those decisions are coming back to bite them.
Earlier this summer, British Columbia’s Transportation Ministry couldn’t tweet essential wildfire road updates because Elon Musk had rate limited accounts across the platform. Now, people in Yellowknife, Kelowna, and anywhere else that may be in the path of the fires can’t access news about it on Facebook or Instagram. Some people have started taking screenshots of articles and sharing them so their friends will be able to see updates being published by news media."
https://www.disconnect.blog/p/roundup-meta-doesnt-care-about-you

2023-08-21 08:01:32

#California #SanFrancisco #DriverlessCars #Cruise #Waymo #AVs: "For the time being, San Francisco residents are in suspense. Cruise’s and Waymo’s driverless cars will compete with medallion taxis and Uber and Lyft. They will likely contribute to congestion, and continue to have near-misses and close calls with cyclists, pedestrians, and other vehicles. To date, there have been about five hundred driverless cars in San Francisco, and they already feel ubiquitous; it’s easy to imagine more of them scrolling up and down the city’s streets. At around eleven o’clock on the night after the C.P.U.C. vote, videos of a traffic jam in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood began circulating on X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter. North Beach is an older neighborhood with many narrow one-way streets, often crowded with people visiting restaurants, bars, and strip clubs. The videos showed at least six driverless Cruise cars stalled at an intersection, creating a cluttered, chaotic snarl. The delays, a spokesperson later explained on X, were caused by a wireless-connectivity issue, created by Outside Lands, a large music festival that was happening on the other side of the city. After fifteen minutes, the cars re-started. (The San Francisco Examiner later reported that the jam was actually caused by a pedestrian who intentionally interfered with one of Cruise’s robo-taxis.) On Thursday night, a driverless Cruise car, carrying a passenger, collided with a fire truck. “One of our cars entered the intersection on a green light and was struck by an emergency vehicle that appeared to be en route to an emergency scene,” a statement from Cruise, posted to the company’s corporate X account, read, raising the possibility that the A.V. did not yield to the emergency vehicle, as a human driver likely would have. “We are investigating to better understand our AVs performance, and will be in touch with the City of San Francisco about the event.”"
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/robo-taxis-are-legal-now

2023-08-20 09:34:51

#AI #GenerativeAI #Llama2 #Meta #OpenSource: "The term “open source” should not be expanded to include releases that do not comply with such a standard (or the existing, general standard embodied in the Open Source Definition). Meta should, therefore, not be using the term “open source” for a model whose license fundamentally breaks open-source development – as is the case with Llama 2’s anti-competitive clauses.
Yet the case also confirms the need to revisit the open source standard, either by modifying the definition itself, or by establishing additional protocols, specific to AI development. Crucially, these should establish norms for training data transparency. Regulators might introduce these – although the recent agreement between the White House and American AI companies indicates that some are reluctant. For this reason, the open-source community should also define a norm – even if questions about data provenance and transparency fall beyond the scope of the traditional open-source approach. The latest discussion paper from the Digital Public Goods Alliance offers guidance. It proposes that the digital public goods standards, when applied to AI systems, require open licensing of training data. The paper also argues for further work on defining a data governance standard for AI systems.
While the Llama 2 release has significant limitations and faults – when reviewed against the emerging principles for open-source AI development – it also includes novel mechanisms, like the attempts to build community-based governance. Hopefully, Meta will commit – in the spirit of such governance – to supporting a collaborative process aimed at defining the standard for open-source AI releases; and to making future release strategies compliant with this standard."
https://openfuture.eu/blog/the-mirage-of-open-source-ai-analyzing-metas-llama-2-release-strategy/

2023-08-20 09:31:26

#Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Scam #Tether #China #Cambodia #SlaveLabor: "I’d been hearing rumors about illicit uses of Tether—I’d seen court documents containing intercepted messages from a Russian money launderer promoting it to his clients, for one thing—but pig butchering was the most concrete example I found. People around the world really were losing huge sums of money to the con. A project finance lawyer in Boston with terminal cancer handed over $2.5 million. A divorced mother of three in St. Louis was defrauded of $5 million. And the victims I spoke to all told me they’d been told to use Tether, the same coin Vicky suggested to me. Rich Sanders, the lead investigator at CipherBlade, a crypto-tracing firm, said that at least $10 billion had been lost to crypto romance scams.
The huge sums involved weren’t the most shocking part. I learned that whoever was posing as Vicky was likely a victim as well—of human trafficking. Most pig-butchering operations were orchestrated by Chinese gangsters based in Cambodia or Myanmar. They’d lure young people from across Southeast Asia to move abroad with the promise of well-paying jobs in customer service or online gambling. Then, when the workers arrived, they’d be held captive and forced into a criminal racket.
Thousands have been tricked this way. Entire office towers are filled with floor after floor of people sending spam messages around the clock, under threat of torture or death. With the assistance of translators, I started video chatting with people who’d escaped."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-08-17/crypto-text-message-scams-lead-back-to-cambodia-slave-labor

2023-08-20 09:06:51

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Llama #Copyright #IP #Books3: "Upwards of 170,000 books, the majority published in the past 20 years, are in LLaMA’s training data. In addition to work by Silverman, Kadrey, and Golden, nonfiction by Michael Pollan, Rebecca Solnit, and Jon Krakauer is being used, as are thrillers by James Patterson and Stephen King and other fiction by George Saunders, Zadie Smith, and Junot Díaz. These books are part of a dataset called “Books3,” and its use has not been limited to LLaMA. Books3 was also used to train Bloomberg’s BloombergGPT, EleutherAI’s GPT-J—a popular open-source model—and likely other generative-AI programs now embedded in websites across the internet. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s use of Books3; Bloomberg did not respond to emails requesting comment; and Stella Biderman, EleutherAI’s executive director, did not dispute that the company used Books3 in GPT-J’s training data."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/08/books3-ai-meta-llama-pirated-books/675063/

2023-08-18 20:12:57

#ML #Science #Reproducibility #DataLeakage: "To minimize errors in ML-based science, and to make it more apparent when errors do creep in, we propose REFORMS (Reporting standards for Machine Learning Based Science) in a preprint released today. It is a checklist of 32 items that can be helpful for researchers conducting ML-based science, referees reviewing it, and journals where it is submitted and published.
The checklist was developed by a consensus of 19 researchers across computer science, data science, social sciences, mathematics, and biomedical research. The disciplinary diversity of the authors was essential to ensure that the standards are useful across many fields. A majority of the authors were speakers or organizers at a workshop we organized last year titled "The Reproducibility Crisis in ML-Based Science." (Videos of the talks and discussions are available on the workshop page.)
The checklist and the paper introducing it are available on our project website. The paper also provides a review of past failures, as well as best practices for avoiding such failures."
https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/introducing-the-reforms-checklist

2023-08-17 19:10:28

#AI #GenerativeAI #Journalism #Media #News: "The Associated Press released guidelines around generative AI to its journalists as it and other news organizations look at ways to use the technology in news gathering.
AP vice president for standards and inclusion Amanda Barrett said in a blog post the publication does not see AI “as a replacement of journalists in any way” but developed guidelines for reporters and editors on how to use it.
Journalists for AP can experiment with ChatGPT but are asked to exercise caution by not using the tool to create publishable content. Any result from a generative AI platform “should be treated as unvetted source material” and subject to AP’s existing sourcing standards. The publication said it will not allow AI to alter photos, videos, or audio and will not use AI-generated images unless it is the subject of a news story. In that event, AP said it would label AI-generated photos in captions."
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/16/23834586/associated-press-ai-guidelines-journalists-openai

2023-08-17 19:10:24

#UK #OSB #Encryption #Cybersecurity #messaging : "The main criticism of the legislation to date has been on freedom of expression grounds. Critics have said it will have a chilling effect, encouraging tech giants to ban users who might get the platforms into trouble with the regulators. Now the companies are warning that the bill has a national security implication too.
Ukraine often uses messaging services to communicate securely with its allies, including the UK. The British armed forces and their allies also use services such as Signal alongside military communications systems. Do ministers really want to weaken western security? Have they thought this through?
If Signal and WhatsApp cannot be used on British-registered phones, anyone who needs access will presumably have to ship in a second, secure device from the US."
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/49f0ac72-3c66-11ee-81cd-1bf34cc855cb?shareToken=d65e5c7e06ed75bbcb822945be00dc25

2023-08-17 18:59:02

#Cybersecurity #DefCon #Bluetooth #iPhone: "Attendees at Def Con, one of the world’s largest hacking conferences, are used to weird shenanigans, such as a seemingly innocuous wall of computer screens that display people’s passwords sniffed over the conference Wi-Fi network. But at this year’s event, even conference veterans were confused and concerned when their iPhones started showing pop-up messages prompting them to connect their Apple ID or share a password with a nearby Apple TV.
As it turned out, these alerts were part of a research project that had two goals.
One was to remind people that to switch off Bluetooth on an iPhone, you have to dig into the Settings app and not just tap it off on the quick-access Control Center, which is displayed by swiping down from the top right corner of the iPhone.
The other was “to have a laugh,” according to Jae Bochs, the security researcher who said they walked around the conference triggering these pop-ups with a custom-made device."
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/16/this-70-device-can-spoof-an-apple-device-and-trick-you-into-sharing-your-password/

2023-08-16 07:58:54

#ClimateChange #CarbonRemoval #USA #Biden: "Let’s start here: Yes, we will probably need carbon dioxide removal, or CDR, to meet the world’s and the country’s climate goals.
This wasn’t always clear. When I started as a climate reporter in 2015, carbon removal was taboo, something that only climate deniers and other folks who wanted to delay decarbonization brought up. An influential Princeton study from earlier in the decade had concluded that carbon removal — especially capturing carbon in the ambient air, a strategy called direct air capture, or DAC — would never pencil out financially and that it would always be cheaper to reduce fossil-fuel use rather than suck carbon out of the sky.
But in 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made a startling announcement: So much carbon dioxide had accumulated in the atmosphere that it would be virtually impossible to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius without carbon removal.
The IPCC studied global energy models and found that even in optimistic scenarios, humanity would release too much carbon by the middle of the century to keep temperatures from briefly rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. But if we began removing carbon from the atmosphere, then we could avoid locking in that spike in temperatures for the long term. That is, in order to hit the 1.5-degree goal by 2100, humanity must spend much of the 21st century removing carbon from the atmosphere and sequestering it for thousands of years.
We need carbon removal, in other words, not so we can keep burning fossil fuels, but to deal with the fossil-fuel pollution that is already in the atmosphere."
https://heatmap.news/economy/carbon-dioxide-removal-industry-biden

2023-08-16 07:52:20

#USA #Iowa #AI #GenerativeAI #ChatGPT #Censorship: "Against a nationwide backdrop of book bans and censorship campaigns, Iowa educators are turning to ChatGPT to help decide which titles should be removed from their school library shelves in order to legally comply with recent Republican-backed state legislation, PopSci has learned.
According to an August 11 article in the Iowa state newspaper The Gazette, spotted by PEN America, the Mason City Community School District recently removed 19 books from its collection ahead of its quickly approaching 2023-24 academic year. The ban attempts to comply with a new law requiring Iowa school library catalogs to be both “age appropriate” and devoid of “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act.” Speaking with The Gazette last week, Mason City’s Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction Bridgette Exman argued it was “simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements.”"
https://www.popsci.com/technology/iowa-chatgpt-book-ban/

2023-08-16 07:49:59

#Smartphones #Mobile: "There's a clear conflict here. On the one hand, we recognize that becoming too dependent on our smartphones can have consequences for our relationships, our mental health, and our working lives. But on the other hand, companies and governments are increasingly building smartphones into the infrastructure of our lives, making it hard — if not impossible — to live without one. Device manufacturers and app developers would love to see us continue to make smartphones essential so that we will always be tied to them. It's unlikely people are going to ditch their smartphones en masse, but that doesn't mean we can't get a better grip on the social impact of using them and make it easier for people to opt out."
https://www.businessinsider.com/impossible-to-break-phone-addiction-iphone-required-apps-2023-8

2023-08-15 11:36:47

#USA #AI #GenerativeAI #Healthcare #Medicine #Hospitals: "As higher computing power has turbocharged AI, algorithms have moved from spotting trends to predicting whether a specific patient will suffer from an ailment. The rise of generative AI has created tools that more closely mimic patient care.
Vijay Pande, a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said health care is at a turning point. “There’s a lot of excitement about AI right now,” he said. “The technology has … gone from being cute and interesting to where actually [people] can see it being deployed.”
In March, the University of Kansas health system started using medical chatbots to automate clinical notes and medical conversations. The Mayo Clinic in Minnesota is using a Google chatbot trained on medical licensing exam questions, called Med-Palm 2, to generate responses to health care questions, summarize clinical documents and organize data, according to a July report in the Wall Street Journal.
Some of these products have already raised eyebrows among elected officials. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) on Tuesday urged caution in the rollout of Med-Palm 2, citing repeated inaccuracies in a letter to Google."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/08/10/ai-chatbots-hospital-technology/

2023-08-15 11:33:52

#Canada #Media #News #SocialMedia #Newspapers #BigTech #Meta #Google: "Canada’s Liberal government picked a fight with two U.S. tech giants by passing legislation forcing Meta and Google to pay news publishers for content. But the battle hasn’t gone quite as expected.
Now, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says big Silicon Valley firms want to make an example out of his country as Meta, fronted by two of Ottawa’s brightest political minds hailing from opposing parties, blocks Canadian news from its platforms.
The company started permanently removing Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram this month, and Canadian media publishers fear the move could deal a massive blow to an industry already gutted by layoffs and closures, teetering on the edge with 60 outlets closing in the past two years alone and CTV, a major television news network, closing its foreign bureaus.
The standoff, closely watched by some congressional representatives and California legislators with similar laws in the works, isn’t just government versus industry. It has plunged Trudeau into a high-stakes public brawl with two veteran political operatives now leading the charge on behalf of Meta — including a top aide to the Conservative prime minister that Trudeau unseated in a landslide. It’s also an unexpected turn for the social-media-friendly prime minister, who actively wooed tech companies to Canada with subsidies, friendly immigration policies, and even socks with geeky references, when meeting Silicon Valley executives."
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/14/behind-trudeaus-standoff-with-big-tech-00110924