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“To Govern AI, We Must Govern Compute” | Lawfare | “…and to protect humanity we must ban big, fast computers”
This blog, in February: “we should totally expect to see legislation, quite soon, telling us that “nobody should be permitted more than [so many bogoMIPS, computrons, or teraflops] at home”” https://alecmuffett.com/article/109130 Now comes Lawfare: The importance of compute to AI capabilities and the feasibility of governing it make it a key intervention point for AI…
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California State Senator Pushes Bill To Remove Anonymity From Anyone Who Is Influential Online | Techdirt
So many problems with this naive concept… and not just the constitutional ones. This bill would require a large online platform, as defined, to seek to verify the name, telephone number, and email address of an influential user, as defined, by a means chosen by the large online platform and would require the platform to…
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Neal Weigel, RIP
Neal first taught me to code. He and Wanda were a cosmopolitan pair who always had interesting tea, an Apple //e, and the latest copy of Scientific American on hand. Alas. He was doing close-in magic on a cruise ship once a few years ago and ran into somebody from Facebook Engineering and explained that…
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The Kids Online Safety Act and the State of Tech Policy | Lawfare
A thoughtful retrospective on the hard (I would say: logically unfixable) issues which plague KOSA in spite of good intention and many, many tweaks: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-kids-online-safety-act-and-the-state-of-tech-policy
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Clause 14 – Powers to obtain communications data: 25 Mar 2024: House of Commons debates | TheyWorkForYou
Sometimes the Scottish National Party says the right thing: We get the motivations for this Bill; they are understood and we are sympathetic with some of what the Bill seeks to achieve. However, we are not convinced that all the powers are shown to have been necessary and proportionate and that there are not other…
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7 years ago, Alec Muffett on Twitter: “…the Home Secretary is literally calling for certain hashtags or words to elicit censorship/blocking on social media”
This is a debate which is now playing out everywhere, especially in the USA where the first amendment people are pointing out that there needs to be a test for government suppression rather than government advice regarding content. Still scary as…
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UK counter-eavesdropping agency gets slap on the wrist for eavesdropping
If you give the state a surveillance power it will be recklessly or wilfully misapplied, misused, or otherwise abused. UK NACE is tasked with protecting the country’s most sensitive information and sites both in Britain itself and in embassies around the world. As part of this duty, the agency was given new powers back in…
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Shoshana Weissmann on Twitter: “…a new [US] age verification [proposal] would force platforms to maintain databases of parents’ / children’s government IDs, face scans etc… until the child turns 18. ENORMOUS cyber risk. Age verification forces cyber risk already and this makes it worse”
We’ve been saying that this would be a consequence since 2016 and nobody has been listening:
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Peter Craddock on the EU’s attempting to force use of contextual, not profiled or targeted, advertising on social platforms | LinkedIn
Even if [contextual advertising provided adequate revenue for a platform to subsist], would that mean that if a particular business gets less revenue from contextual [rather than targeted] ads, it is allowed to place more ads on the service, and that will still be seen as equivalent?If not (i.e. contextual ads do not bring in…
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Heather Burns on Twitter: “This piece … on the Russian digital surveillance system over 540 million teenagers’ accounts, which is presented as “suicide prevention” but is really political surveillance for the Kremlin, reads like a safety tech vendor’s best sales pitch.”
This tweet from Heather links to https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/03/11/they-could-start-to-resist which is a hair-raising read:
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North Korean state TV censors gardener[Alan Titchmarsh]’s trousers
It’s not quite a fair comparison but basically Alan Titchmarsh is a marginally less godlike David Attenborough of British gardening, and this is hilarious: https://www.9news.com.au/world/north-korea-censors-celebrity-gardener-alan-titchmarsh-jeans/fbbc257e-4976-48d2-9d51-81260c61db87