Notices by Michael Veale (mikarv@someone.elses.computer)

Swiss church creates virtual ‘AI Jesus’ talking booth, says 2/3 visiting have a spiritual experience.

eJesus starts off each time: "Do not disclose personal information under any circumstances, use this service at your own risk. Press the button if you accept."

https://www.dw.com/en/switzerlands-ai-jesus-answers-questions-of-faith/video-70737962

@webmink proprietary standards from the ESOs, no? (unless you want to try your hand with an access to information request and push the case law)

Delicious chaos as another DAO found to be an inadvertent general partnership in CA https://gizmodo.com/judge-rules-decentralized-autonomous-organizations-arent-so-decentralized-in-the-eyes-of-the-law-2000526564

The nature of that kind of chaos (in England & Wales): unlimited liability for the partners, much of which cannot be contracted away; liability focussing on the the more visible partners, and inability for the DAO to hold assets without contract. https://cloud-platform-e218f50a4812967ba1215eaecede923f.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/sites/30/2024/07/DAOs-scoping-paper-110724.pdf

Someone who flagged this early on in the US is Carla Reyes in a 2019 article: https://www.gwlr.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/87-Geo.-Wash.-L.-Rev.-373.pdf

Foursquare - perhaps surprisingly - release a large proportion of their geospatial place data (eg business and other Points of Interest), hoping it seems to challenge Google Maps’ proprietary data layer. https://location.foursquare.com/resources/blog/products/foursquare-open-source-places-a-new-foundational-dataset-for-the-geospatial-community/ (via @mrchrisadams)

Bluesky has data portability issues. You can download your data, in *binary format*, — a '.car' file the firm describes as 'not the most accessible' even to devs. To even get a JSON file (also q inaccessible) you... improv poorly documented code. This is uh... not legal https://docs.bsky.app/blog/repo-export

Police sacked for accessing data on Sarah Everard’s case — yet the UK government has introduced a bill to remove the EU-wide obligation to log a justification when police access data in their systems. Sound sensible?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/15/met-officers-accessed-sarah-everard-files-guilty-gross-misconduct

Meanwhile, ‘X Corp’ going full out in their new Terms of Service (active from tomorrow) trying to edge out AI scrapers by threatening to sue mass scrapers $15,000 per 1m tweets scraped — to enclose the dataset for themselves, while forcing users to license their work for the firm’s own AI training.

In response to OpenAI’s recent ‘A Student’s Guide to Writing with ChatGPT’, Arthur Perry (maître de conferénces, Jean Moulin Lyon 3) writes a line-by-line rebuttal — A Student’s Guide to Not Writing with ChatGPT https://www.arthurperret.fr/blog/2024-11-14-student-guide-not-writing-with-chatgpt.html

Interesting case here as a patent is (unsuccessfully) challenged for being based on taking medical knowledge (on malaria treatment) from traditional and indigenous communities via dishonest means: https://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-morality-and-patentability-of.html?m=1

Build it and they will come - the number of criminals misusing law enforcement access portals for platform data is becoming a serious concern, says FBI… https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/08/fbi-says-hackers-are-sending-fraudulent-police-data-requests-to-tech-giants-to-steal-peoples-private-information/

Apple unexpectedly drops its civil suit against #spyware vendor NSO
Group as it claims discovery against it might disclose information that would benefit… spyware vendors. https://www.securityweek.com/apple-suddenly-drops-nso-group-spyware-lawsuit/

Microsoft provides free licenses to schools during pandemic, everyone moves towards them because of free video conferencing and embeds teaching within Teams, then they change terms and start charging for previously free desktop apps and only allow useless Web apps that for anything complex are barely usable. Abusive. https://www.publictechnology.net/2024/07/19/education-and-skills/scottish-councils-face-funding-pinch-over-microsoft-licensing-changes/ See further short paper by me on big edtech lock in https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10160033/1/Veale%202022%20Schools%20EdTech.pdf

The new Tony Blair Institute report on public sector automation savings classifies the potential to automate a task based on… how much GPT-4 classifies a task as automatable.

Is this the worst method ever? It’s absurd, unserious, and any outlet reporting on this uncritically should be humiliated and ridiculed. (seen via @halcyene)

@malwaretech some people also make PRs to the Glitch fork and good ideas can get picked up from there…

or worse, they could use real clips of James Cleverly interviews https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/25/uks-enemies-could-use-ai-deepfakes-to-try-to-rig-election-says-james-cleverly

#Firefox has a new hidden setting auto-rejecting #cookie banners (not just hiding them eg Brave). Piloting in 🇩🇪 in Private Browsing but anyone can enable:
Go to the URL about:config
Set cookiebanners.ui.desktop.enabled ->True
Go to Settings->Privacy, turn on Cookie Banner Blocker.

Meta's #Llama 2 license has an unusual clause whereby they withdraw your right to use the model if you allege #Meta has breached your own IP rights by training their stuff on your intellectual property. #copyright #genai #LLama2

note for all, Rallly is an open source and modern alternative to Doodle without illegal tracking... https://rallly.co
(others include Nextcloud polls, which is great if you have it, and Framadate which is cool but a bit clunky, and dudle which is old school German web code)

#OpenAI is so dedicated to AI safety that as far as I can see, they don't even have a way to report misuse which contravenes their Usage Policies https://openai.com/policies/usage-policies

New 📄: Rights for Those Who Unwillingly, Unknowingly and Unidentifiably Compute!

People's devices are silently co-opted for collective computation which promises data confidentiality. But what happens when ppl don't agree with the computation's ends? https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/4ugxd 🧵