Notices by Miguel Afonso Caetano (remixtures@tldr.nettime.org)

“Some notable entries in the document include:

- Accurint: a LexisNexis tool for locating people that contains all sorts of personal data like addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, and more
Chameleon: a tool which provides “Anonymized means to conduct online investigations, web research, and undercover work”

- Locate X: a tool that lets ICE search a massive database of location data harvested from smartphones. Made by Babel Street, the tool uses data sourced through ordinary apps installed on peoples’ phones or the advertising ecosystem. 404 Media previously reported how the tool could be used to track phones at abortion clinics after privacy advocates gained access to the technology. “It allows investigators to draw a digital fence around an address or area, pinpoint mobile devices that were within that area from mobile data sources,” the document reads

- Cobwebs: a social media tracking tool. 404 Media previously reported Cobwebs also includes Webloc, which can monitor phone locations in entire neighbourhoods

- ISO ClaimSearch: a database that contains property and casualty insurance claims and medical bills. The database is nearly all encompassing and contains details on more than 1.8 billion insurance claims and 58 million medical bills”

https://www.404media.co/leaked-document-shows-the-surveillance-tech-at-ices-fingertips/

#USA #ICE #Immigration #Surveillance #Privacy

LoL:

“Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.

The arrangement, which was critical to Microsoft winning the federal government’s cloud computing business a decade ago, relies on U.S. citizens with security clearances to oversee the work and serve as a barrier against espionage and sabotage.

But these workers, known as “digital escorts,” often lack the technical expertise to police foreign engineers with far more advanced skills, ProPublica found. Some are former military personnel with little coding experience who are paid barely more than minimum wage for the work.

“We’re trusting that what they’re doing isn’t malicious, but we really can’t tell,” said one current escort who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, fearing professional repercussions.
The system has been in place for nearly a decade, though its existence is being reported publicly here for the first time.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-digital-escorts-pentagon-defense-department-china-hackers

#USA #CyberSecurity #Microsoft #DoD #China

“U.S. prosecutors have accused a Florida man of uploading fake video games that contained malware to Steam, the popular PC games platform. Once victims downloaded and installed the games, the malware was designed to infect their computers, steal their passwords and other data, and drain their crypto wallets, according to a criminal complaint.

On Tuesday, the FBI arrested Zyaire Wilkins, a 21-year-old Florida resident and student. On Wednesday, prosecutors accused him and a number of unnamed co-conspirators of hacking crimes. Over the past two years, Wilkins and his partners allegedly published several malware-laden video games on Steam, including BlockBlasters, Dashverse, Lampy, Lunara, and PirateFi. Using that malware, says the FBI, Wilkins and his accomplices infected around 8,000 victims, and then hacked around 80 cryptocurrency wallets to steal at least $220,000 worth of crypto.

Wilkins and the others marketed their malicious video games on Discord, LinkedIn, and Telegram, according to the authorities.”

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/17/fbi-arrests-man-accused-of-using-steam-games-to-drain-victims-crypto-wallets/

#CyberSecurity #Steam #Videogames #Crypto #Cryptocurrencies

"The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is reportedly ending its deal with Flock Safety, a surveillance company that helps law enforcement track vehicles using thousands of its license plate cameras placed across the United States.

A senior LAPD official told news outlets, first reported by ABC7 and the Los Angeles Times, that the police department would allow its three-year contract with Flock to expire when it ends on Saturday. The department cited “serious concerns” around civil liberties and privacy. Flock’s cameras are operated by the Atlanta, Georgia-based company and not the LAPD.

“This contract is not being renewed because of serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues, particularly around privacy and the data that is being collected from these cameras,” LAPD’s chief information officer Dean Gialamas was quoted as saying. “The LAPD had to make a difficult decision, in this case discontinuing using Flock services until we can get those data, privacy, security and sharing concerns ironed out through a contractual relationship.”

A spokesperson for the LAPD did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch over the weekend, and it’s unclear if Flock’s cameras will continue recording in absence of an active contract. According to ABC7, the police department is seeking new language in its contract addressing privacy and data storage concerns."

https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/13/lapd-lets-contract-with-surveillance-giant-flock-expire-citing-serious-concerns-over-civil-liberties-and-privacy/

#USA #LA #LosAngeles #Flock #LAPD #Privacy #Surveillance #CivilLiberties

Yup. It’s pretty much the main social network I use nowadays. Reddit is only good for lurking, Facebook is only for propaganda/broadcasting, and LinkedIn is only good for schmoozing. Mastodon is the real deal :-D

“ Mastodon’s like email that way. Plus it does all the Post and Repost and Quote and Follow and Reply and Like and Block stuff that you’re used to, and there are thousands of servers. Anyone can run one and nobody can own the whole thing. It doesn’t have ads and it won’t. It’s dead easy to use and it’s fun and you should give it a try.

The rest of this essay goes into detail about why Mastodon is generally great and why the alternatives have little future. But if the pitch sounds good so far, stop reading, go get an account, and climb on board.

Why now? · Along with that “can’t be owned” and “no ads” stuff, the software is getting really good, particularly in the last couple of releases. It’s got cool features you won’t find elsewhere, and there’s very little cool stuff from elsewhere that’s not here. ¶

There was a time when newly-arrived people had confusing or unfriendly experiences, or missed features that were important to them. It looks to me like those days are over.”

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/07/05/Choose-Mastodon

#SocialMedia #SocialNetworks #Mastodon #Decentralization

“In the new study, Chatoo created an AI-supported resume for a marketing position and asked 1,000 adults in the U.K. to evaluate the candidate during April 2026. The evaluators received identical resumes and were told that the candidate had used AI assistance. The only difference among the resumes was the candidate’s name. Half of the evaluators saw Emily Clarke, while half saw James Clark.

Despite identical resume content, the evaluators judged women candidates much more harshly for using AI assistance than men.

The evaluators who attributed the AI-assisted resume to a woman were twice as likely to question the candidate’s competency. “She can’t even write a CV herself—not sure she has the skill to carry out the job,” said one of the evaluators of Emily’s resume.

In contrast, evaluators who attributed the AI-assisted resume to a man were twice as likely to view the candidate as showing initiative. In other words, a woman’s use of AI was evidence of inability, while a man’s use of AI to create the identical product was viewed as pragmatic problem solving.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelletravis/2026/06/25/women-who-use-ai-seen-as-incompetent-men-who-use-ai-seen-as-pragmatic

#AI #Sexism #GenderBias

“Google wants a look at your hands before it lets you through. The company’s newest reCAPTCHA check, rolling out now as a test, asks you to switch on your camera and wave at it so an algorithm can decide whether you’re a human or a bot.

That wave is less casual than it looks. The system records a short video of your hand and pulls 21 hand-landmark coordinates from it, mapping your finger joints, your palm geometry, and the way you move in real time.

Google describes the purpose as liveness detection, a way for websites to fend off automated account creation, credential-stuffing, and other fraud. But this is still a biometric scan, collected so you can prove you’re a person and still involves turning on your cameras for Google.”

https://reclaimthenet.org/googles-new-recaptcha-wants-your-camera-access-and-21-points-of-your-hand

#Google #ReCAPTCHA #Biometrics #Privacy

"France is currently glowing red with heat. Not metaphorically. Literally. Land surface temperatures in parts of the country have been recorded at levels more commonly associated with the Sahara Desert.

France. The country of vineyards, alpine villages, stone farmhouses, rivers, forests and temperate European summers. Looking like the Sahara. That should stop us in our tracks.

The real story isn’t that France is having a heatwave. It’s that climate change is making places behave like somewhere else. Places are beginning to lose the climate that shaped their buildings, their farms, their infrastructure, their ecosystems, their communities, cultures and expectations of normal life.

France isn’t built for the Sahara. Its schools, homes, hospitals, railways, power stations and aged-care facilities weren’t designed for repeated extreme heat. Its rivers weren’t meant to run so hot that nuclear power stations have to reduce output because cooling water is too warm. Its classrooms weren’t meant to become dangerous places for children to sit exams."

https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/france-is-hotter-than-the-sahara-this-is-everyone-s-warning

#ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #France #Europe

"Sony is contacting PlayStation Store users who bought movies from the platform that were distributed by StudioCanal—like Terminator 2, Total Recall, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind—to say that “you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.” There’s no mention of any refunds or make-goods for the affected users. Sony simply says the films are going away “due to our content licensing agreements,” once again reaffirming the fact that you are never truly buying anything that’s digital, just temporarily renting it.

This news was brought to people’s attention by X user somatyk, who posted the notification they had received from PlayStation this week."

https://kotaku.com/playstation-store-movies-digital-studio-canal-terminator-2000711013

#Sony #PlayStation #DRM #StudioCanal #Copyright #IP

“The problem is, there's no such thing as "age verification" for the internet. What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance, so invasive and pervasive that it makes the ad-tech industry's commercial surveillance look like some kind of cypherpunk darknet pirate utopia:
(…)
"Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. This nightmare is the surveillance advertising industry's fondest dream, a world where it's literally illegal to avoid their tracking, all in the name of saving kids…from them!

So it's not just a weird alliance of anti-Big Tech crusaders and the conspiratorial right that's pushing for age verification – they are unwitting allies of the very tech industry they think they're fighting. Those tech industry insiders are fully aware that an "age verification" mandate is really a way for the government to teach every child how to use a VPN. They're also fully aware that the next move is to ban VPNs:“

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/23/destroy-the-village/

#AgeVerification #Surveillance #Privacy #VPNs #DigitalRights

"That pattern held for chief executives of Fortune 500 companies. Since we couldn’t directly measure the size of their egos, we measured factors that many previous studies have identified as reliable proxies for narcissism: the sizes of their pay packages, their signatures and their photos in their company reports. (No, the chief executives probably aren’t directly overseeing the page layout, but their underlings have to figure out what will and won’t please the boss.) Commanding outsize compensation and projecting an outsize image sends a message right out of Ron Burgundy’s playbook: I’m kind of a big deal. We found that the higher chief executives scored on this index, the more likely they were to seek power and status by becoming chairmen of their own companies and joining the boards of other companies. These were the chief executives who made the most negative statements about remote and hybrid work during the first two years of the pandemic.

The connection between narcissistic personality traits and wanting people in the office full time is not coincidental — it’s causal."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-bosses.html

#WfH #Remote #RemoteWork #Narcissism #Psychology

"A study of physicians in Poland who specialize in endoscopy — the use of flexible probes to examine the inside of the human body — shows how quickly AI tools can erode human abilities. The physicians, who had all performed at least 2,000 colonoscopies during their careers, were given access to an AI system that analyses colonoscopy images in real time and flags a type of precancerous intestinal lesion called an adenoma. The tool was available to the specialists on some days but not on others.

Once physicians began using it, their performance dropped significantly whenever the system was unavailable. During the three-month period before the AI tool was introduced, the specialists found at least one adenoma during 28.4% of colonoscopies. During the three-month period after the tool was introduced, the adenoma detection rate for colonoscopies performed without AI assistance decreased to 22.4%.

Gastroenterology and Hepatology, suggest that even highly skilled professionals might get worse at tasks that their job requires as they become more dependent on AI tools, says Robert Wachter, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco, who is the author of a book on how AI tools are transforming health care. The study authors say that continuous exposure to such tools can cause clinicians to become “less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making cognitive decisions without AI assistance”.

Co-author Yuichi Mori, a physician-researcher at the University of Oslo, says that more studies are needed to confirm the phenomenon. But people who use AI tools should be aware that they risk losing some of their skills, he adds. “There is no established solution against deskilling right now. It should be a very hot research topic in the next decade.”"

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1

#AI #Deskilling #Science #Medicine

"“If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II,” is the title of Adrian de Wynter’s paper showing his work. He told 404 Media that absurdity can be a powerful tool. “I have this tendency to dial up things to 11 when I really think I need to make a point,” he said. “I should also note that absurdism is pretty standard in philosophy and theoretical computer science.”

And so De Wynter built an LLM within AoEII using goats. “The point of the paper is to formally show that we anthropomorphise too readily, and that sometimes the claims we make with regards to LLM capabilities are too strong,” he told 404 Media. “It's not an easy task, given that ‘human-like attributes’ is a bit of an abstract term.”
AoEII has a scenario editor, a sandbox mode that allows players to craft their own maps and quests using the game’s assets, and De Wynter used that to build an operational NOT AND (NAND) gate and a 1-bit perceptron within the game. In this crude version of an LLM, grass is 0, bridges are 1, and goats are the bits. “Only one rail is active at a time, with a goat acting as the signal carrier. When the gate fires, the bit-goats are removed (they ded) and a new bit-goat is placed in its respective output rail,” Wynter explained on his GitHub.

A perceptron is the simplest form of a neural network, it’s an algorithm that sorts an input into binary classes. YouTube is littered with videos of players doing the same thing with redstone in Minecraft. But no one claims the goats of AoEII are neurons in a thinking machine or that the complicated tracks of NAND gates players build in Minecraft show emergent intelligence."

https://www.404media.co/if-ai-is-sentient-then-so-is-age-of-empires-ii/

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #NeuralNetworks #VideoGames #AgeOfEmpires #Perceptron

"In the North Atlantic Ocean, south of Greenland and Iceland, a large patch of water is doing something very strange. While the rest of the ocean heats up, it’s been getting colder. A new study says it has the answer to this mystery — and it’s an ominous sign the world is hurtling toward one of the most alarming climate tipping points.

The swath of ocean — dubbed the “cold blob” or “warming hole” — has cooled by nearly 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) since 1900.

Scientists have long debated whether this anomaly is driven by heat loss from the ocean surface due to changes to winds and clouds, or whether it’s a signal of the weakening of a critical system of ocean currents, which transports heat. The new research concludes it’s the latter, and the finding points to a worrying future.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, works like a vast ocean conveyor belt, pulling warm water from the tropics to the Northern Hemisphere, where it cools, sinks and flows back south.

A raft of research suggests this system is weakening as human-driven global warming melts ice and causes a surge of freshwater into the ocean, disrupting the AMOC’s delicate balance of heat and salinity. Some scientists warn the AMOC is heading toward a tipping point, potentially as early at this century, which would mean a future collapse is locked in.

An AMOC shutdown would be a global catastrophe, causing accelerated sea level rise on the US East Coast, plunging Europe into a winter deep freeze and shifting the monsoon in Africa, driving prolonged droughts."

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/12/climate/cold-blob-atlantic-amoc-ocean-circulation

#ClimateChange #Weather #AMOC #GlobalWarming

"In the months that followed, public health models would indicate Musk was a killer, at a far greater scale than any Coen brothers villain. A tracker co-created by Boston University professor Brooke Nichols projected over 780,000 deaths — mostly of children, many of infants — due to the Trump administration’s early-2025 USAID cuts, caused by malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, and more. These deaths were widely predicted from the beginning, a direct, known, and undeniable consequence of DOGE’s actions. We don’t know the precise number of deaths, but multiple experts working on identifying the scale of the tragedy have generally agreed it’s in the hundreds of thousands. Global researchers, publishing in Nature, project that the cuts to USAID could result in 163,500 child deaths yearly. Another publication in The Lancet says there could be millions more to come. Musk showed no sign of caring.

During a televised cabinet meeting at the White House in 2025, Musk, wearing a murdered-out MAGA hat signed by his boss, had a giggle about “accidentally” canceling Ebola prevention. He said it was a mistake that would be fixed. USAID whistleblower Nicholas Enrich, testifying before Congress, said that fix never came. A little more than a year after Musk’s comments, Africa is facing what could become the worst Ebola outbreak ever. And DOGE’s cleaver to USAID goes well beyond the latest Ebola crisis. According to Enrich, the HIV rate among new babies being born was looking close to zero, until Musk intervened."

https://www.theverge.com/tech/949259/the-worlds-first-trillionaire-is-a-killer

#USA #USAID #DOGE #Musk #Plutocracy #PublicHealth

"Central banks are under siege in many countries but nowhere more prominently than in the United States, where MAGA partisans see control over the Federal Reserve as being critical to the future of their movement. The confirmation of Kevin Warsh as the new Fed chair is a significant step in that direction.

Warsh has no formula for delivering the low interest rates that Donald Trump demands without depriving the central bank of the main instrument it uses to combat inflation. As policy dilemmas intensify, pressure will soon mount to further open the edifice of monetary policy to the forces of populist authoritarianism.

For about half a century, central banks were “independent,” with their operations and decisions placed in the hands of economic experts whose main task was to set interest rates at levels that would prevent inflation. In doing so, they were shielded from interference by politicians, special interests, and public opinion. That consensus is now clearly breaking down."

https://jacobin.com/2026/05/warsh-fed-chair-trump-independence

#USA #FED #Banking #Finance #PoliticalEconomy

"As parents, educators, and lawmakers across the United States make the case that school shouldn’t be a place where kids zone out on devices, interact with risky algorithms, or unwittingly hand over data to profit-driven third parties, we have the opportunity to ask ourselves: How should we think about school? To begin answering this question, Jacobin consulted stakeholders in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest district.

A key theme that emerged from these discussions is the importance of thinking about school in the present. Technology’s allure is always future oriented: Personal computing was going to supercharge productivity; social media and smartphones would strengthen interpersonal connections; and now AI will streamline the world of work. And for three-quarters of a century, education technology vendors have promised to optimize student learning and eliminate the busywork of teaching. But as Charles Logan, T. Philip Nichols, and Antero Garcia recently argued in Kappan, “the future they’re selling has not arrived — and perhaps it never will. But de-skilling, surveillance, and extraction — all of that is happening now, in our classrooms, today.”

“It just doesn’t make sense to train six-year-olds on technology that may be obsolete in a few years,” Kate Brody told Jacobin. Nor does it make sense to train them “on consumer-facing technologies that are designed to be used intuitively” — as opposed to, say, reading, which is anything but intuitive."

https://jacobin.com/2026/05/educational-technology-children-learning-iready

#EdTech #USA #Education #Schools #LosAngeles

RT @davidrkadler
Hello 👋 Many friends have asked me about the significance about this Supreme Court ruling on Cuba 🇨🇺.

“Why,” they ask, “would a US court ruling matter for a foreign country – with its own laws, and its own institutions?”

The answer is simple — if you follow Marco Rubio’s imperial logic to its conclusion.

So let’s break it down ⏬

The US is right now preparing to invade Cuba, where it hopes to reintroduce the colonial dynamic that defined the US-Cuban relationship for decades.

What does that mean in practice? It means dividing the spoils of the island between Cuban-American counter-revolutionaries & US corporations.

Beachfront property, rural farms, industrial capacity — all of it. That is the prize — and the real motivation — for Rubio’s invasion.

Why does this matter for US citizens on the other side of the border? 🧐

Because after invasion — and after six decades of punishing economic sanctions — the US plans to pummel Cuba with cash.

Sounds good, right? 🤑 Nope! I can guarantee you that this money will not go to ordinary Cubans.

And here we come back to the Supreme Court ruling.

The ruling basically means that all the “charitable” cash the US injects into the island will immediately leave again — fleeing into the hands of the ultra-wealthy domiciled abroad.

Through cases at the US Supreme Court, those “exiles” will be awarded huge payments out of Cuban coffers — only serving to impoverish further a population that has already suffered so much under US siege.

What is the lesson? 🙇♂️ Well, mine is that we must always read US law through the broader analytical prism of our imperial project — a project that does not provide for justice, but rather paves the way for the plunder of foreign nations close and far.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/us/politics/supreme-court-cuba-cruises-oil.html

"The undersigned organisations condemn Meta’s recent decision to restrict the Facebook and Instagram accounts of independent NGOs, researchers, and civil society figures from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This is the latest in a pattern of major technology companies, including Meta, acting as enforcement arms for repressive governments in the Gulf. We call on Meta to uphold its human rights responsibilities and ensure that users’ content is not arbitrarily restricted.

Since 30 April 2026, Gulf-focused NGOs ALQST for Human Rights and Democratic Diwan, as well as Saudi researcher Abdullah Alaoudh and human rights defender Yahya Assiri, have had their Facebook accounts rendered “unavailable” in Saudi Arabia at the request of the Saudi government, in a form of “geo-blocking”. Similar restrictions have been imposed in the UAE, including against an academic. According to Meta's publicly available content restriction reports, over 100 Facebook pages and Instagram accounts have been restricted since March 2026. This follows a similar pattern on X (formerly Twitter). Most recently, the Saudi government requested that a number of X accounts belonging to prominent Saudi activists be geo-blocked. As of the publication date (20 May), X had not complied.

The undersigned organisations consider these measures arbitrary, discriminatory, and a direct violation of the right to freedom of expression and access to information. Affected users were notified that Meta acted in response to a “local legal requirement” or a “request from a government” (i.e. Saudi Arabia and the UAE), demonstrating the company’s willingness to comply with demands from state authorities that routinely suppress, surveil, and criminalise online expression."

https://www.alqst.org/en/post/meta-blocks-human-rights-accounts-from-reaching-audiences-in-saudi-arabia-and-the-uae

#SocialMedia #SaudiArabia #UAE #Censorship #Meta #Instagram #Facebook

"A new class action lawsuit accuses OpenAI of sharing data including user chat queries and personal identifying information like emails and user IDs with the tech giants — and targeted advertising behemoths — Meta and Google, without obtaining proper user consent.

Filed yesterday in California, the lawsuit claims that OpenAI’s data-sharing with Google and Meta violates the California Invasion of Privacy Act, known as CIPA, as well as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. It points specifically to OpenAI’s integrations with Meta Pixel and Google Analytics, which are data-tracking and collection tools that facilitate targeted advertisements.

The data-tracking model described in the lawsuit — often referred to as “surveillance capitalism” — is the business that the modern internet is built on today. And OpenAI, like countless other tech companies, does include language in its privacy policy noting that it does collect, store, and share a range of consumer inputs and personal information."

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-personal-information-meta-google

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #Surveillance #Meta #Google #DataProtection #Privacy