# orderedItems[].object.content
Sorry, but I don't believe in for-profit social media companies... Ultimately, this has all elements to end badly for the users.

"When I spoke this week to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, she was gratified by the new users. “It’s been a wild week,” she says. But she noted that this spike was one of several over the past few months. Bluesky, she says, is in it for the long haul. The idea is not to recreate classic Twitter, she says, but to reshape social media on the principle of openness and user control. Remember the cool way that the internet worked before those fluffy companies got all proprietary and evil? That’s the Bluesky vision, a digital version of the hippie dream. Graber’s word cloud is full of stuff like radical transparency, and she gushes about the AT Protocol, the open-source framework that Bluesky is built on. Without getting into the weeds on this, the bottom line is that by opening everything up, communities—instead of corporate control freaks—can shape Bluesky to allow for delightful customized experiences.

Take content moderation. To purge the service of illegalities and harassers, Bluesky has brought on contractors to assist the mere 20 or so people currently employed. But the bulk of the feed-policing is expected to be crowdsourced—because of Bluesky’s open design, committed outsiders can build systems to implement their own standards. Once this system flowers, users will be able to pick the regimen that suits their comfort level."

https://www. wired.com/story/plaintext-blue sky-says-it-wont-screw-things-up/

#SocialMedia #SocialNetworks #BlueSky #ContentModeration #Verification

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
Sorry, but I don't believe in for-profit social media companies... Ultimately, this has all elements to end badly for the users.

"When I spoke this week to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, she was gratified by the new users. “It’s been a wild week,” she says. But she noted that this spike was one of several over the past few months. Bluesky, she says, is in it for the long haul. The idea is not to recreate classic Twitter, she says, but to reshape social media on the principle of openness and user control. Remember the cool way that the internet worked before those fluffy companies got all proprietary and evil? That’s the Bluesky vision, a digital version of the hippie dream. Graber’s word cloud is full of stuff like radical transparency, and she gushes about the AT Protocol, the open-source framework that Bluesky is built on. Without getting into the weeds on this, the bottom line is that by opening everything up, communities—instead of corporate control freaks—can shape Bluesky to allow for delightful customized experiences.

Take content moderation. To purge the service of illegalities and harassers, Bluesky has brought on contractors to assist the mere 20 or so people currently employed. But the bulk of the feed-policing is expected to be crowdsourced—because of Bluesky’s open design, committed outsiders can build systems to implement their own standards. Once this system flowers, users will be able to pick the regimen that suits their comfort level."

https://www. wired.com/story/plaintext-blue sky-says-it-wont-screw-things-up/

#SocialMedia #SocialNetworks #BlueSky #ContentModeration #Verification

# orderedItems[].object.content
"To succeed, Europe needs a bold industrial strategy that integrates the digital and green transitions. Securing resilient supply chains, investing in renewable energy and clean technologies, and building sovereign digital infrastructures — the EuroStack — are essential and urgent.

Decarbonization is not just a climate goal — it is an economic and security imperative. Yet, despite its urgency, we are failing to meet the targets required to limit warming to 1.5°C (degrees). Emissions hit record highs in 2023, consuming over 10% of the remaining carbon budget. Europe must achieve its Fit for 55 targets of cutting emissions by 55% by 2030 and pursue a 90% reduction by 2040. These targets are non-negotiable, but current efforts are falling short. Uneven global decarbonization adds to the challenge, threatening to undermine Europe’s progress and making it even more critical to accelerate the twin transition."

https://medium.com/@francescabria/a-pr ogressive-vision-for-industrial-policy-and-competitiveness-6f41b1ba31ed

#EU #Europe #IndustrialPolicy #DigitalSovereignty #CleanTech #RenewableEnergy #Decarbonization

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
"To succeed, Europe needs a bold industrial strategy that integrates the digital and green transitions. Securing resilient supply chains, investing in renewable energy and clean technologies, and building sovereign digital infrastructures — the EuroStack — are essential and urgent.

Decarbonization is not just a climate goal — it is an economic and security imperative. Yet, despite its urgency, we are failing to meet the targets required to limit warming to 1.5°C (degrees). Emissions hit record highs in 2023, consuming over 10% of the remaining carbon budget. Europe must achieve its Fit for 55 targets of cutting emissions by 55% by 2030 and pursue a 90% reduction by 2040. These targets are non-negotiable, but current efforts are falling short. Uneven global decarbonization adds to the challenge, threatening to undermine Europe’s progress and making it even more critical to accelerate the twin transition."

https://medium.com/@francescabria/a-pr ogressive-vision-for-industrial-policy-and-competitiveness-6f41b1ba31ed

#EU #Europe #IndustrialPolicy #DigitalSovereignty #CleanTech #RenewableEnergy #Decarbonization

# orderedItems[].object.content
"A paper[1] presented at last week's EMNLP conference reports on a promising new AI-based tool (available at https://spinach.genie.stanford.edu/ ) to retrieve information from Wikidata using natural language questions. It can successfully answer complicated questions like the following:

"What are the musical instruments played by people who are affiliated with the University of Washington School of Music and have been educated at the University of Washington, and how many people play each instrument?"

The authors note that Wikidata is one of the largest publicly available knowledge bases [and] currently contains 15 billion facts, and claim that it is of significant value to many scientific communities. However, they observe that Effective access to Wikidata data can be challenging, requiring use of the SPARQL query language.

This motivates the use of large language models to convert natural language questions into SPARQL queries, which could obviously be of great value to non-technical users."

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Resear ch:Newsletter/2024/November

#Wikipedia #Wikidata #LLMs #AI #GenerativeAI #SPARQL

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
"A paper[1] presented at last week's EMNLP conference reports on a promising new AI-based tool (available at https://spinach.genie.stanford.edu/ ) to retrieve information from Wikidata using natural language questions. It can successfully answer complicated questions like the following:

"What are the musical instruments played by people who are affiliated with the University of Washington School of Music and have been educated at the University of Washington, and how many people play each instrument?"

The authors note that Wikidata is one of the largest publicly available knowledge bases [and] currently contains 15 billion facts, and claim that it is of significant value to many scientific communities. However, they observe that Effective access to Wikidata data can be challenging, requiring use of the SPARQL query language.

This motivates the use of large language models to convert natural language questions into SPARQL queries, which could obviously be of great value to non-technical users."

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Resear ch:Newsletter/2024/November

#Wikipedia #Wikidata #LLMs #AI #GenerativeAI #SPARQL

# orderedItems[].object.content
"Changing levels of public trust in the news are of deep concern to both researchers and practitioners. We use data from 2015 to 2023 in 46 countries to explore how trust in news has changed, while also exploring the links with sociodemographic variables, differences by media system, and changing patterns of news use. We find that (a) there has been a small overall decline in trust in news since 2015, but also that (b) there are different trends in different countries. More specifically, trust has declined more in media environments that have become less structured by television news use, and increasingly structured by social media news use. Our findings underscore how changing structures of media use may be central to explaining trust dynamics in recent years, which suggests new avenues for restoring trust where it has eroded."

https://academic.oup.com/joc/advance-a rticle/doi/10.1093/joc/jqae044/7907139?login=false

#Media #News #Journalism #TrustInNews

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
"Changing levels of public trust in the news are of deep concern to both researchers and practitioners. We use data from 2015 to 2023 in 46 countries to explore how trust in news has changed, while also exploring the links with sociodemographic variables, differences by media system, and changing patterns of news use. We find that (a) there has been a small overall decline in trust in news since 2015, but also that (b) there are different trends in different countries. More specifically, trust has declined more in media environments that have become less structured by television news use, and increasingly structured by social media news use. Our findings underscore how changing structures of media use may be central to explaining trust dynamics in recent years, which suggests new avenues for restoring trust where it has eroded."

https://academic.oup.com/joc/advance-a rticle/doi/10.1093/joc/jqae044/7907139?login=false

#Media #News #Journalism #TrustInNews

# orderedItems[].object.content
"OpenAI is once again lifting the lid (just a crack) on its safety-testing processes. Last month the company shared the results of an investigation that looked at how often ChatGPT produced a harmful gender or racial stereotype based on a user’s name. Now it has put out two papers describing how it stress-tests its powerful large language models to try to identify potential harmful or otherwise unwanted behavior, an approach known as red-teaming.

Large language models are now being used by millions of people for many different things. But as OpenAI itself points out, these models are known to produce racist, misogynistic and hateful content; reveal private information; amplify biases and stereotypes; and make stuff up. The company wants to share what it is doing to minimize such behaviors.

MIT Technology Review got an exclusive preview of the work. The first paper describes how OpenAI directs an extensive network of human testers outside the company to vet the behavior of its models before they are released. The second paper presents a new way to automate parts of the testing process, using a large language model like GPT-4 to come up with novel ways to bypass its own guardrails."

https://www. technologyreview.com/2024/11/2 1/1107158/how-openai-stress-tests-its-large-language-models/?utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=Active%20Qualified&utm_content=11-22-2024&mc_cid=f4a6507b8a

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #ChatGPT #LLMs #AITraining

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
"OpenAI is once again lifting the lid (just a crack) on its safety-testing processes. Last month the company shared the results of an investigation that looked at how often ChatGPT produced a harmful gender or racial stereotype based on a user’s name. Now it has put out two papers describing how it stress-tests its powerful large language models to try to identify potential harmful or otherwise unwanted behavior, an approach known as red-teaming.

Large language models are now being used by millions of people for many different things. But as OpenAI itself points out, these models are known to produce racist, misogynistic and hateful content; reveal private information; amplify biases and stereotypes; and make stuff up. The company wants to share what it is doing to minimize such behaviors.

MIT Technology Review got an exclusive preview of the work. The first paper describes how OpenAI directs an extensive network of human testers outside the company to vet the behavior of its models before they are released. The second paper presents a new way to automate parts of the testing process, using a large language model like GPT-4 to come up with novel ways to bypass its own guardrails."

https://www. technologyreview.com/2024/11/2 1/1107158/how-openai-stress-tests-its-large-language-models/?utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=Active%20Qualified&utm_content=11-22-2024&mc_cid=f4a6507b8a

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #ChatGPT #LLMs #AITraining

# orderedItems[].object.content
"Why are rural voters more likely to support radical right parties? This paper examines the mechanisms behind the relationship between living in a rural area and supporting the Portuguese radical-right party Chega. Portugal's radical right is an interesting case study, not only because of its belated but very fast electoral growth but also because Portugal represents an unusual case of economic convergence between urban and rural areas in the last decade, challenging one of the traditional explanations for rural populism — economic grievances. Using data from exit polls from the 2022 and 2024 elections, we start by showing that voters living in a rural area are characterized by disproportionally high levels of support for Chega. Then, using a 2023 face-to-face national survey, we use parallel mediation models to test different mechanisms that relate rurality with the vote for the radical right. We find no evidence that cultural and economic factors play a relevant role in the relationship between rurality and the radical right vote in Portugal. Instead, rural residents are more likely to perceive the areas where they live as politically neglected, and it is this perception that feeds, in turn, into support for the radical right. Political neglect emerges as the key mediating factor, shedding light on the dynamics of radical right-wing populism in rural regions."

https://www. sciencedirect.com/science/arti cle/pii/S0962629824001732

#Portugal #FarRight #Politics #Democracy #Elections #Chega

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
"Why are rural voters more likely to support radical right parties? This paper examines the mechanisms behind the relationship between living in a rural area and supporting the Portuguese radical-right party Chega. Portugal's radical right is an interesting case study, not only because of its belated but very fast electoral growth but also because Portugal represents an unusual case of economic convergence between urban and rural areas in the last decade, challenging one of the traditional explanations for rural populism — economic grievances. Using data from exit polls from the 2022 and 2024 elections, we start by showing that voters living in a rural area are characterized by disproportionally high levels of support for Chega. Then, using a 2023 face-to-face national survey, we use parallel mediation models to test different mechanisms that relate rurality with the vote for the radical right. We find no evidence that cultural and economic factors play a relevant role in the relationship between rurality and the radical right vote in Portugal. Instead, rural residents are more likely to perceive the areas where they live as politically neglected, and it is this perception that feeds, in turn, into support for the radical right. Political neglect emerges as the key mediating factor, shedding light on the dynamics of radical right-wing populism in rural regions."

https://www. sciencedirect.com/science/arti cle/pii/S0962629824001732

#Portugal #FarRight #Politics #Democracy #Elections #Chega

# orderedItems[].object.content
RT @IEthics
Reader, they did not "clone human personalities."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10109

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
RT @IEthics
Reader, they did not "clone human personalities."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10109

# orderedItems[].object.content
"So it’s not terribly surprising that the Justice Department wants Mehta to break up Google. While we don’t know what Mehta will do, we do know that this won’t be resolved any time soon. While Google will probably have to kill its sweetheart deal with Apple, which is worth as much as $20 billion, it seems unlikely that Google will have to sell Chrome and Android. If the issue is that Google could exploit those products to suppress rival search engines, the judge could simply order Google not to do that, according to Erik Hovenkamp, a professor at Cornell Law School.

“If Google abides by that, then it gets to keep Chrome and Android,” Hovenkamp said. “A judge is not going to want to break up a big company that generates a lot of popular products, if it thinks that there’s a less intrusive remedy that would eliminate the bad conduct.”

And again, Google really does not want to sell off Chrome and Android. Google said in a blog post in October, “Splitting off Chrome or Android would break them — and many other things” and would “raise the cost of devices.”

Then again, if a judge forced Google to sell off Chrome and Android, the company could be forced to make its search engine better in order to fend off competition in the search engine business. But speculating can be a fool’s errand. What we do know is Chrome, at least for another year, is a gateway into the Google ecosystem, so much so you may have even forgotten that Google is watching everything you do when you’re using its browser."

https://www. vox.com/technology/387375/goog le-chrome-antitrust-privacy-android

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
"So it’s not terribly surprising that the Justice Department wants Mehta to break up Google. While we don’t know what Mehta will do, we do know that this won’t be resolved any time soon. While Google will probably have to kill its sweetheart deal with Apple, which is worth as much as $20 billion, it seems unlikely that Google will have to sell Chrome and Android. If the issue is that Google could exploit those products to suppress rival search engines, the judge could simply order Google not to do that, according to Erik Hovenkamp, a professor at Cornell Law School.

“If Google abides by that, then it gets to keep Chrome and Android,” Hovenkamp said. “A judge is not going to want to break up a big company that generates a lot of popular products, if it thinks that there’s a less intrusive remedy that would eliminate the bad conduct.”

And again, Google really does not want to sell off Chrome and Android. Google said in a blog post in October, “Splitting off Chrome or Android would break them — and many other things” and would “raise the cost of devices.”

Then again, if a judge forced Google to sell off Chrome and Android, the company could be forced to make its search engine better in order to fend off competition in the search engine business. But speculating can be a fool’s errand. What we do know is Chrome, at least for another year, is a gateway into the Google ecosystem, so much so you may have even forgotten that Google is watching everything you do when you’re using its browser."

https://www. vox.com/technology/387375/goog le-chrome-antitrust-privacy-android

# orderedItems[].object.content
@ecadre Thank you, but I'm not the author of the article. I'm just posting an excerpt here ;)

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
@ecadre Thank you, but I'm not the author of the article. I'm just posting an excerpt here ;)

# orderedItems[].object.content
"Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.

If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.

I won’t beat around the bush. Microsoft Office doesn’t make it easy to opt out of this new AI privacy agreement, as the feature is hidden through a series of popup menus in your settings:

On a Windows computer, follow these steps to turn off “Connected Experiences”: File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”"

https://medium.com/illumination/ms-wor d-is-using-you-to-train-ai-86d6a4d87021

#Microsoft #AI #GenerativeAI #AITraining #MSWord #Privacy #Word

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
"Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.

If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.

I won’t beat around the bush. Microsoft Office doesn’t make it easy to opt out of this new AI privacy agreement, as the feature is hidden through a series of popup menus in your settings:

On a Windows computer, follow these steps to turn off “Connected Experiences”: File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”"

https://medium.com/illumination/ms-wor d-is-using-you-to-train-ai-86d6a4d87021

#Microsoft #AI #GenerativeAI #AITraining #MSWord #Privacy #Word

# orderedItems[].object.content
"As part of the U.S. pledge to cut its total greenhouse gas emissions in half by the end of the decade, compared to 2005 levels, President Joe Biden has vowed to eliminate all power grid emissions by 2035.

But there are 220 new gas-burning power plants in various stages of development nationwide, according to the market data firm Yes Energy. Most of those plants are targeted to come online before 2032. Each has a lifespan of 25 to 40 years, meaning most would not be fully paid off — much less shut down — before federal and state target dates for transitioning power grids to cleaner electricity.

The trend may continue. President-elect Donald Trump and his advisers have repeatedly vowed to scrap rules on power plant emissions, which could unleash even more fossil plant construction and delay retirements of existing plants.

In several parts of the nation, data centers are the largest factor behind the building boom, according to analysts and utilities, but the precise percentage of new demand attributable to data centers is not known. Power companies have also been bracing for other new demands, including a proliferation of new factories across the country and the transition to electric vehicles and home appliances such as heat pumps."

https://www. washingtonpost.com/climate-env ironment/2024/11/19/ai-cop29-climate-data-centers/

#USA #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #FossilFuels #AI #DataCenters #GasEmissions

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
"As part of the U.S. pledge to cut its total greenhouse gas emissions in half by the end of the decade, compared to 2005 levels, President Joe Biden has vowed to eliminate all power grid emissions by 2035.

But there are 220 new gas-burning power plants in various stages of development nationwide, according to the market data firm Yes Energy. Most of those plants are targeted to come online before 2032. Each has a lifespan of 25 to 40 years, meaning most would not be fully paid off — much less shut down — before federal and state target dates for transitioning power grids to cleaner electricity.

The trend may continue. President-elect Donald Trump and his advisers have repeatedly vowed to scrap rules on power plant emissions, which could unleash even more fossil plant construction and delay retirements of existing plants.

In several parts of the nation, data centers are the largest factor behind the building boom, according to analysts and utilities, but the precise percentage of new demand attributable to data centers is not known. Power companies have also been bracing for other new demands, including a proliferation of new factories across the country and the transition to electric vehicles and home appliances such as heat pumps."

https://www. washingtonpost.com/climate-env ironment/2024/11/19/ai-cop29-climate-data-centers/

#USA #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #FossilFuels #AI #DataCenters #GasEmissions

# orderedItems[].object.content
"For determined hackers, sitting in a car outside a target's building and using radio equipment to breach its Wi-Fi network has long been an effective but risky technique. These risks became all too clear when spies working for Russia's GRU military intelligence agency were caught red-handed on a city street in the Netherlands in 2018 using an antenna hidden in their car's trunk to try to hack into the Wi-Fi of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Since that incident, however, that same unit of Russian military hackers appears to have developed a new and far safer Wi-Fi hacking technique: Instead of venturing into radio range of their target, they found another vulnerable network in a building across the street, remotely hacked into a laptop in that neighboring building, and used that computer's antenna to break into the Wi-Fi network of their intended victim—a radio-hacking trick that never even required leaving Russian soil.

At the Cyberwarcon security conference in Arlington, Virginia, today, cybersecurity researcher Steven Adair will reveal how his firm, Volexity, discovered that unprecedented Wi-Fi hacking technique—what the firm is calling a “nearest neighbor attack"—while investigating a network breach targeting a customer in Washington, DC, in 2022. Volexity, which declined to name its DC customer, has since tied the breach to the Russian hacker group known as Fancy Bear, APT28, or Unit 26165."

https://www. wired.com/story/russia-gru-apt 28-wifi-daisy-chain-breach/

#CyberSecurity #Russia #StateHacking #FancyBear #APT28 #Wifi

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
"For determined hackers, sitting in a car outside a target's building and using radio equipment to breach its Wi-Fi network has long been an effective but risky technique. These risks became all too clear when spies working for Russia's GRU military intelligence agency were caught red-handed on a city street in the Netherlands in 2018 using an antenna hidden in their car's trunk to try to hack into the Wi-Fi of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Since that incident, however, that same unit of Russian military hackers appears to have developed a new and far safer Wi-Fi hacking technique: Instead of venturing into radio range of their target, they found another vulnerable network in a building across the street, remotely hacked into a laptop in that neighboring building, and used that computer's antenna to break into the Wi-Fi network of their intended victim—a radio-hacking trick that never even required leaving Russian soil.

At the Cyberwarcon security conference in Arlington, Virginia, today, cybersecurity researcher Steven Adair will reveal how his firm, Volexity, discovered that unprecedented Wi-Fi hacking technique—what the firm is calling a “nearest neighbor attack"—while investigating a network breach targeting a customer in Washington, DC, in 2022. Volexity, which declined to name its DC customer, has since tied the breach to the Russian hacker group known as Fancy Bear, APT28, or Unit 26165."

https://www. wired.com/story/russia-gru-apt 28-wifi-daisy-chain-breach/

#CyberSecurity #Russia #StateHacking #FancyBear #APT28 #Wifi

# orderedItems[].object.content
"I compared how senators voted on these resolutions to how much money (in the form of political contributions) they received from pro-Israel interest groups during the 2024 senate election cycle (2019-24).

Specifically, I compared the median amount of pro-Israel cash accepted by the group of senators who voted against Sanders’s resolutions — i.e., who voted to approve the weapons sales to Israel — to the median amount accepted by the senators who voted for Sanders’s resolutions, i.e., to block the weapons sales to Israel.

The senators who voted to approve the arms sales to Israel accepted over three times more money from pro-Israel donors than those who voted to block the sales. The precise amounts were $197,974 and $63,613, respectively.

If you want a full breakdown of how each senator voted on all three resolutions and the amount each received in pro-Israel donations, you have two options"

https://www. stephensemler.com/p/did-pro-is rael-cash-affect-senate

#USA #Senate #Israel #Lobbying #Warmongers

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
"I compared how senators voted on these resolutions to how much money (in the form of political contributions) they received from pro-Israel interest groups during the 2024 senate election cycle (2019-24).

Specifically, I compared the median amount of pro-Israel cash accepted by the group of senators who voted against Sanders’s resolutions — i.e., who voted to approve the weapons sales to Israel — to the median amount accepted by the senators who voted for Sanders’s resolutions, i.e., to block the weapons sales to Israel.

The senators who voted to approve the arms sales to Israel accepted over three times more money from pro-Israel donors than those who voted to block the sales. The precise amounts were $197,974 and $63,613, respectively.

If you want a full breakdown of how each senator voted on all three resolutions and the amount each received in pro-Israel donations, you have two options"

https://www. stephensemler.com/p/did-pro-is rael-cash-affect-senate

#USA #Senate #Israel #Lobbying #Warmongers

# orderedItems[].object.content
"A regulation that works might well produce no visible sign that it's working. If your water purification system works, everything is fine. It's only when you get rid of the sanitation system that you discover why it was there in the first place, a realization that might well arrive as you expire in a slick of watery stool with a rectum so prolapsed the survivors can use it as a handle when they drag your corpse to the mass burial pits.

When Musk and Ramaswamy decry the influence of "unelected bureaucrats" on your life as "undemocratic," they sound reasonable. If unelected bureaucrats were permitted to set policy without democratic instruction or oversight, that would be autocracy.

Indeed, it would resemble life on the Tesla factory floor: that most autocratic of institutions, where you are at the mercy of the unelected and unqualified CEO of Tesla, who holds the purely ceremonial title of "Chief Engineer" and who paid the company's true founders to falsely describe him as its founder.

But that's not how it works! At its best, expert regulations turns political choices in to policy that reflects the will of democratically accountable, elected representatives. Sometimes this fails, and when it does, the answer is to fix the system – not abolish it."

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/pol icy-based-evidence/#decisions-decisions

#Science #ScientificMethod #Regulation #AntiScience #Libertarianism

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
"A regulation that works might well produce no visible sign that it's working. If your water purification system works, everything is fine. It's only when you get rid of the sanitation system that you discover why it was there in the first place, a realization that might well arrive as you expire in a slick of watery stool with a rectum so prolapsed the survivors can use it as a handle when they drag your corpse to the mass burial pits.

When Musk and Ramaswamy decry the influence of "unelected bureaucrats" on your life as "undemocratic," they sound reasonable. If unelected bureaucrats were permitted to set policy without democratic instruction or oversight, that would be autocracy.

Indeed, it would resemble life on the Tesla factory floor: that most autocratic of institutions, where you are at the mercy of the unelected and unqualified CEO of Tesla, who holds the purely ceremonial title of "Chief Engineer" and who paid the company's true founders to falsely describe him as its founder.

But that's not how it works! At its best, expert regulations turns political choices in to policy that reflects the will of democratically accountable, elected representatives. Sometimes this fails, and when it does, the answer is to fix the system – not abolish it."

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/pol icy-based-evidence/#decisions-decisions

#Science #ScientificMethod #Regulation #AntiScience #Libertarianism

# orderedItems[].object.content
"Narayanan and Kapoor, both Princeton University computer scientists, argue that if we knew what types of AI do and don’t exist—as well as what they can and can’t do—then we’d be that much better at spotting bullshit and unlocking the transformative potential of genuine innovations. Right now, we are surrounded by “AI snake oil” or “AI that does not and cannot work as advertised,” and it is making it impossible to distinguish between hype, hysteria, ad copy, scam, or market consolidation. “Since AI refers to a vast array of technologies and applications,” Narayanan and Kapoor explain, “most people cannot yet fluently distinguish which types of AI are actually capable of functioning as promised and which types are simply snake oil.”

Narayanan and Kapoor’s efforts are clarifying, as are their attempts to deflate hype. They demystify the technical details behind what we call AI with ease, cutting against the deluge of corporate marketing from this sector. And yet, their goal of separating AI snake oil from AI that they consider promising, even idealistic, means that they don’t engage with some of the greatest problems this technology poses. To understand AI and the ways it might reshape society, we need to understand not just how and when it works, but who controls it and to what ends."

https://newrepublic.com/article/188313/artifical-intelligence-scams-propaganda-deceit

#AI #PredictiveAI #SiliconValley #SnakeOil #Scams #Propaganda #AIHype #AIBubble #PoliticalEconomy

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
"Narayanan and Kapoor, both Princeton University computer scientists, argue that if we knew what types of AI do and don’t exist—as well as what they can and can’t do—then we’d be that much better at spotting bullshit and unlocking the transformative potential of genuine innovations. Right now, we are surrounded by “AI snake oil” or “AI that does not and cannot work as advertised,” and it is making it impossible to distinguish between hype, hysteria, ad copy, scam, or market consolidation. “Since AI refers to a vast array of technologies and applications,” Narayanan and Kapoor explain, “most people cannot yet fluently distinguish which types of AI are actually capable of functioning as promised and which types are simply snake oil.”

Narayanan and Kapoor’s efforts are clarifying, as are their attempts to deflate hype. They demystify the technical details behind what we call AI with ease, cutting against the deluge of corporate marketing from this sector. And yet, their goal of separating AI snake oil from AI that they consider promising, even idealistic, means that they don’t engage with some of the greatest problems this technology poses. To understand AI and the ways it might reshape society, we need to understand not just how and when it works, but who controls it and to what ends."

https://newrepublic.com/article/188313/artifical-intelligence-scams-propaganda-deceit

#AI #PredictiveAI #SiliconValley #SnakeOil #Scams #Propaganda #AIHype #AIBubble #PoliticalEconomy

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"Cape runs its own mobile core, all of the software necessary to route messages, authenticate users, and basically be a telecom. Ultimately, this gives Cape the control to do more privacy-enhancing things, such as periodically give its phones a new IMEI—a unique identifier for the phone—and new IMSI—a similar identifier but one attached to the SIM card (or eSIM in Cape’s case). The phone can also give itself a new mobile advertising identifier (MAID), which is an identifier advertising ecosystems and apps use to track peoples’ web browsing activity and is sometimes linked to their physical movement data. Cape said the IMEI and MAID rotation is handled by the custom Cape handset, which runs standard up-to-date Android.

Cape lets users create bundles of these identifiers, called “personas,” then cycle through them at different points. This means that during some attacks, a Cape phone may look like a different phone each time. The device can do this in a few ways. In the first, users can set geofences around a particular area, meaning that when they enter that location—such as their home, place of work, or commute—the device automatically switches to a particular IMSI, IMEI, and MAID. Secondly, users can set it to switch between these sets of identifiers after an approximate period of time has passed, between one hour and one day, with an option to add some percentage of variation between each rotation."

https://www. 404media.co/i-dont-own-a-cellp hone-can-this-privacy-focused-network-change-that/

#CyberSecurity #Mobile #Privacy #Cellphones #MobileSecurity #Cape

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
"Cape runs its own mobile core, all of the software necessary to route messages, authenticate users, and basically be a telecom. Ultimately, this gives Cape the control to do more privacy-enhancing things, such as periodically give its phones a new IMEI—a unique identifier for the phone—and new IMSI—a similar identifier but one attached to the SIM card (or eSIM in Cape’s case). The phone can also give itself a new mobile advertising identifier (MAID), which is an identifier advertising ecosystems and apps use to track peoples’ web browsing activity and is sometimes linked to their physical movement data. Cape said the IMEI and MAID rotation is handled by the custom Cape handset, which runs standard up-to-date Android.

Cape lets users create bundles of these identifiers, called “personas,” then cycle through them at different points. This means that during some attacks, a Cape phone may look like a different phone each time. The device can do this in a few ways. In the first, users can set geofences around a particular area, meaning that when they enter that location—such as their home, place of work, or commute—the device automatically switches to a particular IMSI, IMEI, and MAID. Secondly, users can set it to switch between these sets of identifiers after an approximate period of time has passed, between one hour and one day, with an option to add some percentage of variation between each rotation."

https://www. 404media.co/i-dont-own-a-cellp hone-can-this-privacy-focused-network-change-that/

#CyberSecurity #Mobile #Privacy #Cellphones #MobileSecurity #Cape

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"China has long been a billion-plus-person experiment in total state surveillance, with virtually no legal checks on the government's ability to physically and digitally monitor its citizens. When so much control of citizens' private data amasses within a few government agencies, however, it doesn't stay there. Instead, that bounty of private info has also leaked onto a lively black market—one where insiders sell off their own access to any scammer or stalker willing to pay.

At the Cyberwarcon security conference in Arlington, Virginia, on Friday, researchers from the cybersecurity firm SpyCloud plan to present their findings from monitoring a collection of black market services that offer cheap and easy searches of Chinese citizens' data. The vendors in many cases obtain that sensitive information by recruiting insiders from Chinese surveillance agencies and government contractors and then reselling their access, no questions asked, to online buyers. The result is an ecosystem that operates in full public view where, for as little as a few dollars worth of cryptocurrency, anyone can query phone numbers, banking details, hotel and flight records, or even location data on target individuals."

https://www. wired.com/story/chineses-surve illance-state-is-selling-citizens-data-as-a-side-hustle/

#China #Surveillance #PoliceState #DataProtection #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Privacy

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
"China has long been a billion-plus-person experiment in total state surveillance, with virtually no legal checks on the government's ability to physically and digitally monitor its citizens. When so much control of citizens' private data amasses within a few government agencies, however, it doesn't stay there. Instead, that bounty of private info has also leaked onto a lively black market—one where insiders sell off their own access to any scammer or stalker willing to pay.

At the Cyberwarcon security conference in Arlington, Virginia, on Friday, researchers from the cybersecurity firm SpyCloud plan to present their findings from monitoring a collection of black market services that offer cheap and easy searches of Chinese citizens' data. The vendors in many cases obtain that sensitive information by recruiting insiders from Chinese surveillance agencies and government contractors and then reselling their access, no questions asked, to online buyers. The result is an ecosystem that operates in full public view where, for as little as a few dollars worth of cryptocurrency, anyone can query phone numbers, banking details, hotel and flight records, or even location data on target individuals."

https://www. wired.com/story/chineses-surve illance-state-is-selling-citizens-data-as-a-side-hustle/

#China #Surveillance #PoliceState #DataProtection #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Privacy

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"Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice submitted its final proposed remedy to Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in U.S. v. Google (2020), in which Judge Mehta ruled that Google monopolized the search market as well as the market for general search text advertising. The proposed remedies outline ways in which the court can rectify Google’s monopolistic behaviors in search so that the market, startups, advertisers, publishers, and consumers can all begin benefitting from more competition in the online search market. Google is expected to respond by submitting its own remedy to the court December 20. Public Knowledge supports the DOJ’s final proposal, which critically encompasses both structural and behavioral relief to address Google’s anticompetitive harms in online search."

https://publicknowledge.org/public-kno wledge-commends-justice-department-on-its-proposed-final-judgment-for-remedies-in-u-s-v-google/

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
"Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice submitted its final proposed remedy to Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in U.S. v. Google (2020), in which Judge Mehta ruled that Google monopolized the search market as well as the market for general search text advertising. The proposed remedies outline ways in which the court can rectify Google’s monopolistic behaviors in search so that the market, startups, advertisers, publishers, and consumers can all begin benefitting from more competition in the online search market. Google is expected to respond by submitting its own remedy to the court December 20. Public Knowledge supports the DOJ’s final proposal, which critically encompasses both structural and behavioral relief to address Google’s anticompetitive harms in online search."

https://publicknowledge.org/public-kno wledge-commends-justice-department-on-its-proposed-final-judgment-for-remedies-in-u-s-v-google/

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"I'm not here to diminish the need for AI training for educators, or to chastise Common Sense Media's involvement with OpenAI. Rather, it's useful for me to look at what this relationship produced, as a way of making sense of the kind of thinking that OpenAI is engaged in around education.

One criticism of the course’s design is that its videos lack closed captioning. That's a problem from accessibility, and little mention of accessibility is acknowledged here.

In the sections below I want to provide some useful counter-arguments for what the OpenAI course is "teaching." My goal is to offer more nuance to its definitions and highlight the bias of its framing. Much of this will be analyzed through the lens of my piece on "Challenging the Myths of Generative AI," which offers a more skeptical framework for thinking through how we talk about and use AI."

https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/how-does-openai-imagine-k-12-education/

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #K12 #Education #Schools

# orderedItems[].object.contentMap.pt
"I'm not here to diminish the need for AI training for educators, or to chastise Common Sense Media's involvement with OpenAI. Rather, it's useful for me to look at what this relationship produced, as a way of making sense of the kind of thinking that OpenAI is engaged in around education.

One criticism of the course’s design is that its videos lack closed captioning. That's a problem from accessibility, and little mention of accessibility is acknowledged here.

In the sections below I want to provide some useful counter-arguments for what the OpenAI course is "teaching." My goal is to offer more nuance to its definitions and highlight the bias of its framing. Much of this will be analyzed through the lens of my piece on "Challenging the Myths of Generative AI," which offers a more skeptical framework for thinking through how we talk about and use AI."

https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/how-does-openai-imagine-k-12-education/

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #K12 #Education #Schools