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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
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Kay Jebelli on Twitter: “It seems that mandatory forced scrolling is indeed a requirement of DMA compliance.”
Oh My God: the EU wants to obligate people to scroll up and down an entire list of browsers (i.e. all the way to the bottom to click ‘Confirm’) in order to demonstrate that they have made an informed choice of web browser on iOS. Governments are attempting to dictate user interface experiences. This will
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Should Western Democracies ban the general public from learning about, using, or building their own AI technologies? | POLITICO
Whoops, does that sound iliberal or contentious? That’s me paraphrasing; the original quote goes like this: “The Harris-Zuckerberg showdown captures another key question for policymakers: Should AI be limited to a handful of trusted companies or opened up to all comers to exploit?” …that said, I think I captured the nuance better in the title
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Good Luck Fighting Disinformation | The Atlantic
It doesn’t matter how great your intention, the ability for the state to dictate the boundaries of people’s speech, is censorship: Five months later, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law. But for Sawyer and other proponents of the bill, known as AB 2098, the victory was short-lived. The legislation immediately became snarled
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How the DMCA Anticipated the DSA’s Due Process Obligations by Eric Goldman, Sebastian Felix Schwemer :: SSRN
Basically: how the obligations which the DSA imposes upon platforms were foreshadowed in the American DMCA, and the substantial issues which are caused by placing due-process obligations upon private platforms: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4733551 Via https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2024/03/new-essay-comparing-due-process-approaches-in-the-dmca-and-dsa.htm
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Google Ordered To Identify Who Watched Certain YouTube Videos
You’ve got to admit it makes sense: rather than be left entirely in the dark, post a video which your perpetrator is sure to watch and then subpoena the identities of all 30,000 people who watched it, and investigate/filter all of them until you find the person you wanted. That’s proportionate, right? https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2024/03/22/feds-ordered-google-to-unmask-certain-youtube-users-critics-say-its-terrifying/
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I built ByteDance’s censorship machine | Protocol
This website and article have vanished from the clear web, but remain as relevant and eye-opening today as they did in 2021. Never forget, it is the “trust and safety” architecture which can and will be repurposed for censorship until people do it to themselves The truth is, political speech comprised a tiny fraction of
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Money Talks | “Why Amazon should be afraid of Temu” | …and not just Amazon
I had a visit from an appliance repair tech to service my dishwasher last week, and he was extremely enthusiastic about Temu as a source for dirt cheap tools/consumables like blades for oscillating multi-tools. When you can get a massive variety pack for £25 from Temu, or pay the same for one or perhaps two