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Kinahan Cartel: Wanted Narco Boss Exposes Whereabouts by Posting Google Reviews | bellingcat
If you’re going to change your identity and go underground, stop posting restaurant reviews on Google. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2024/03/30/kinahan-cartel-wanted-narco-boss-exposes-whereabouts-by-posting-google-reviews/
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Essential Sunday Reading: danah boyd (@zephoria) and @candice_odgers rebut @JonHaidt’s “Anxious Generation”
Thought: if we are “losing our kids to smartphones” perhaps we as parents should first go looking for them, and then lead the way? In the same vein as my yesterday’s post, the redoubtable danah boyd comments on Jon Haidt’s new book: It is deeply frustrating to watch Haidt cherrypick and twist research that I…
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The Coddling of the Boomer Parental Guilt-Complex
I’m simply gobsmacked that an author who is popularly known as one of the lead critics of safetyism and the risks inherent in figuratively wrapping one’s children in cotton wool to protect them for the world, should now whirl in-place and start demanding bans and blocks to stop kids talking to one another — finding…
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How to spot academic papers which have been massaged or substantially rewritten by ChatGPT
1: expansion of author vocabulary 2: academic citation style Details: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGeaAyDNE/
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Prof Ross Anderson, RIP
This is not something I was expecting or ever imagining I would write; I’ve just heard. This is a tremendous loss for us all. Professor Ross Anderson, FRS, FREng Our dear friend and treasured long term campaigner for privacy and security, Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University and Edinburgh University, Lovelace Medal winner, died…
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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…