Border authorities in China can search electronic devices as well as collect emails, pictures, and videos of foreigners entering the country. No warrant needed. These searches can be conducted in case of emergencies - although it seems like there are no checks & balances in place to reign in or even track when this is being done. Or why.
what do you use when you want to plot values in a chart quickly and neatly?
i don't mean "for production" or "for publishing". i just mean: you have a data set and you want to see lines on a line chart for yourself, just to get an intuition about what the data shows.
curious about the go-to solution of other folx when it comes to quick #dataviz.
ahead of the vote on the new proposal for #ChatControl, worth remembering that the mass-scanning of private communications, invalidating end-to-end encryption, weakening the security of our devices via client-side scanning and treating EU citizens as potentially culpable by default are *not* viable solutions to *any* issue.
kind reminder that #llm technology is not truth-seeking, that it merely reproduces without attempting to understand, that the made-up content is an intentional effect of how the algorithm works, that #ai kills and that #chatgpt puts large amounts of natural resources to waste only to feed us bullshit
Pro-Palestinian protests in Romania have been met with hostility and control from the police forces.
From banning banners with slogans that do not infringe on rights, and neither do they incite to violence, to harassing protesters, to summoning people who intended to protest to the police station for "friendly advice", we see Ro police taking sides. The side of genocide.
The Ministry doesn't have any competence to decide what propaganda & disinformation is. The end result may be that legitimate speech gets classified as malicious, or that truly harmful speech gets classified as legit. Both are dangerous.
There *could be* a collaboration (and knowledge sharing) between Gov. & civic society & academia, under the #DSA. But the Ro #DSC is adamant in not reaching out and involving these sectors. We also don't know which ones the competent authorities are. 3/4
Last but not least, there is no transparency, nor feedback.
A user doesn't find out whether the content they reported was forwarded to the adequate VLOP. We don't even get to know how many reports the Ministry processed, who they forwarded the reports to and whether action was taken to remove the content.
The form asks citizens to provide an e-mail address, but doesn't mention why, doesn't indicate what it will be used for (hello, #GDPR).
The Romanian Ministry of Digitalization released a form that people can use to report malicious #deepfake materials. What counts as malicious? Fraud, propaganda, disinformation.
98% of #deepfake material is pornographic. 99% of the victims of deepfake pornography identify as women.
In Ro, journalists & activists have been adamant about showing the violence against women perpetrated online and aided by technology.
Yet, the Gov. chose to focus on 2% of all deepfakes, thus creating a false narrative that this tech is used mainly to influence elections and commit fraud - when, in fact, the majority of victims are being ignored. 2/4
OpenAI has partnered with StackOverflow to use the content on the site to train ChatGPT. Some users who have posted highly-rated answers have tried to either delete or edit them. But they noticed that the moderators changed their edits back and their old answers re-appeared. Then the moderators banned them for 7 days.
Oh and while we're on the subject, Valve also removed the ban on AI-generated art on Steam.
Anything we put up in these walled gardens will be monetized.
It's especially important since the only *other* time I hear people defending cash is when they fear a take-over from a shady, world-wide organization. And it's not that they want freedom, but they want another shady, world-wide organization to *not* lose its foothold.
I'm making a list of Mastodon and other Fediverse instances either hosted in Romania, registered on a .ro domain or with content that is mostly Romanian (regardless of where they are hosted).
The reason behind this: the Ro digital service coordinator added some extra hoops on top of what DSA requires. We're trying to figure out who will be affected.
If anyone knows such instances, please leave them in a public or private toot (or boost / tag folx who can help) <3
Amnesty (who I hope will join the Fediverse soon) published an interview where I repeat, as a little broken record, that all tech is political. There's no such thing as neutral tech.
“My approach to technology is informed by political struggles.”
It features spyware, ChatControl, and the Amnesty Digital Forensics Fellowship.
i'm bringing stickers i drew, printed and cut myself to #cccamp . they are just cute messages, they don't stand for any company or group. i'd love to trade stickers and learn how other folx print their own #stickers and #zines .
these are some of the stickers i'll have with me at #ccamp23
Google employees publishing an extremely toxic #WebDRM proposal in their own names, then raining down with "respectability politics" on the comments.
Framing centralized control of who gets to browse the Internet as "safe for users" is playing the age old card of authoritarianism being in the interest of the "weak and feeble-minded".
There will be no civil engagement with proposals of domination and coercion.
@aral my dream is to have Computer Science courses in colleges talk about a career as a tech activist, or a programmer in the civic society as a very reputable and viable career option.
I work as a programmer supporting journalists and activists exclusively. I've worked for the IT industry in the first part of my career. In my mind and, really, in my body, these two environments feel drastically different.
@emilygorcenski@chadloder there's only so much nuance that gets captured in one sentence. I definitely see how this can be read as putting the onus on each individual user. I boosted this because I felt like it reflected my ongoing thought that the weight of guarding against exploitation should be shared, not centralized on the shoulders of admins. I find it crucial that we get good at thinking about our confidentiality, and about what we say & where we say it.
Software Dev @ OCCRP. Digital Rights Cat at @apti. Communicator for Wikimedians of Romania and Moldova. Open-Source Dev, Human Rights Advocacy, OSINT. Queer, RA 🏳️🌈