"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
#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."
#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."
#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/
nostr:npub15w5xwgp4jy94hc7d5pt6hm7dgeg460csypvu34e7ygcejnw5eupq0xtse4 article is behind a paywall but it’s kind of wild there seems to always be a cloud first mentality and no acknowledgement of a local only/first approach.
Maybe the audience is a normie, non tech one.
nostr:npub15rqfygk2l9aa8ryqf2eh3440en7lweg4rzrf0p2860uxdfjlnwks60f0yv here is the full article: https://archive.fo/osFJp
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. 💡
#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."
#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/
#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."
#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."
#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."
#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
#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
#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
#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/
#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
#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
#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.”"
#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
#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/