#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/#
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...
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/
#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."
#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."
#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"
#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."
#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
#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/
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
"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/
#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."
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.
#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
#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."
#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/
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.
#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/
#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."
#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."