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How AI fake news is creating a ‘misinformation superspreader’ | The Washington Post
Gosh, can you remember when it was the internet itself that was the problem? Or email spam? Or the Web and UGC? Or Social Media? Good times, good times… <laughs in historical perspective> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/17/ai-fake-news-misinformation/
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Mangajin Archives Now Available – Comics Worth Reading
From 2020; I love that there are resources online like this. I also hate that the truth is: I don’t have time for shit like this. It’s hard enough to keep on top of laundry, cleaning, parenting, housekeeping/DIY, and blogging. Mangajin ran from 1990-1997, a total of 70 issues. It was an English-language magazine that taught
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Dare Obasanjo on Apple’s App Tracking Transparency
Quoth Dare, pointedly: Someone asked what are the tradeoffs that are left unsaid in Apple’s ATT prompts. There are a few 1. You are still going to see ads, in fact you will get more ads as ad systems don’t know your interests and will need more attempts to get you to buy something. 2.
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Amazing: today we have at least two stories — one old, one new — about Governments wanting to suppress public discussion of attempted surveillance
The first is about Margaret Thatcher and the Peter Wright / “Spycatcher” affair; the second is from India re: the Government being angry at Apple for being frank with people about apparent attempts of the Indian state to hack into activist iPhones. “The Spycatcher scandal contributed more than anything to bring the spies out of
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The reason why armchair (and professional) lawyers who want to argue the Open AI vs: New York Times copyright lawsuit, should look towards the Dead Sea Scrolls…
This is written-up in a bunch[1] of places, but basically: the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered circa 1946, then excavated, and then hoarded by academics who wanted to only release them piecemeal and slowly, after consideration. Alas for this plan: to assist researchers who wanted to run statistical analyses of which words were where on
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The UK’s Online Safety Bill – allegedly the ‘safest place in the world to be online’ – ConnectFutures
This is not a terribly *bad* little blogpost by Connected Futures, however I do wish that they would not (like so many others) indulge in false dichotomy: Whose job is it to keep the online space safe? ‘Big Tech’ companies or government? https://connectfutures.org/resources/the-uks-online-safety-bill-allegedly-the-safest-place-in-the-world-to-be-online/ Unpopular as it may be amongst Governments who want to be seen
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Kevin A. Bryan on X: “NYT/OpenAI lawsuit completely misunderstands how LLMs work, and judges getting this wrong will do huge damage to AI. Basic point: LLMs DON’T “STORE” UNDERLYING TRAINING TEXT. It is impossible, the parameter size of GPT-3.5 or 4 is not enough to losslessly encode the training set”
I’m seeing lawyers and their peers in Civil Society saying stuff along the lines of: Ooh, the GPT4 bot is quoting entire NYT articles, and it’s leaving out stuff which reflects the NYT style guide which proves that it’s up to no good! …which is an understandable position to take if and only if GPT4
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PODCAST | Encrypting Facebook Messenger with Jon Millican and Timothy Buck
Facebook Messenger has finally been end-to-end encrypted, a couple of years after Mark Zuckerberg announced it! Plus Instagram DMs are trialing ephemeral E2EE DMs too! We invited on Jon Millican and Timothy Buck from Meta to discuss this major cross-platform endeavor, and how David Bowie fits into their personal Labyrinth. https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2023/12/28/e2ee-fb-messenger/
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Statement about the EU Cyber Resilience Act – Bits from Debian | …oh, this is glorious
The open source community suddenly discovers the “yes but we didn’t mean like that”-effect… https://bits.debian.org/2023/12/debian-statement-cyber-resillience-act.md.html
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Something interesting to read: the history of iodised salt in Switzerland
Jonah Goodman · A National Evil https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/jonah-goodman/a-national-evil
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Okta says the quiet part out loud: the goal of (all) digital identity systems is to lock people in so that they are under control; “Lock in their loyalty,” indeed
Now: how about the European Union wanting digital national identity cards to be used to log into Facebook? Previously…