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

"It’s a shame that definitions of antisemitism are being weaponized as a way to attack legitimate criticism of Israel, because antisemitism is one of the worst ideological scourges our species holds. Given the hideous history of the treatment of Jews in the world, culminating in the unfathomable act of evil that was the Holocaust, we must always be vigilant against anti-Jewish bigotry. The Municipal Action Index is on solid ground when it recommends hosting Jewish cultural events and teaching Jewish history to children, and the IHRA identifies plenty of genuine examples of antisemitism like “making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective.” But it’s clear that a lot of this is about trying to silence those who are rightly critical of Israel for its mass killing of Palestinians, not about antisemitism.

There would be nothing wrong with adopting a “working definition” of antisemitism if it confined itself to clear examples of actual antisemitism. But the IHRA definition is badly in need of revision. It needs to expunge “examples” that are not cases of antisemitism. And until it is revised (“working” implies provisional, after all), nobody should support the use of this definition and should instead stick to the perfectly serviceable definition “bigotry against Jewish people.”"

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/aoc-and-the-question-of-defining-antisemitism

#USA #Israel #Antisemitism #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide #AOC

"If the Biden administration’s stance is that Israel is entitled to continue the war until it achieves its own self-defined objectives, what is the point of pretending that there can be a negotiated settlement?

The answer is public opinion. Very few Democrats approve of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and a majority of Americans who voted for Biden want the United States to halt weapons transfers to Israel. Biden knows a policy that guarantees endless war is unpopular and would create further backlash. He has therefore hoped to satisfy both pro-Israel Democrats and critics of the war by continuing to transfer unlimited arms while also appearing to negotiate a peace deal. The diplomacy theater is an effort to convince the public that Biden’s hands are tied—that while he would like to end the war, he simply cannot, and the most powerful country in the world is powerless.

That narrative has been successful. Plenty of people who should know better have accepted at face value the Biden administration’s claim that it is trying to bring about peace."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/11/26/gaza-ceasefire-israel-biden-netanyahu-hamas-us-diplomacy/

#USA #Biden #Israel #Palestine #Ceasefire #Gaza #Warmonger

"Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.

If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.

I won’t beat around the bush. Microsoft Office doesn’t make it easy to opt out of this new AI privacy agreement, as the feature is hidden through a series of popup menus in your settings:

On a Windows computer, follow these steps to turn off “Connected Experiences”: File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”"

https://medium.com/illumination/ms-word-is-using-you-to-train-ai-86d6a4d87021

#Microsoft #AI #GenerativeAI #AITraining #MSWord #Privacy #Word

"Gig workers expressed that, after noticing frequent changes on the listing platforms that were made without their consent, they started to see themselves as laboratory rats rather than valued users. Because their messages were blocked by chatbots, they were unable to speak to the platform to complain or opt out of the changes. Frustration flared and apathy set in. Their income and well-being declined.

This is concerning, not only because of how it affects gig workers, but also because academics are increasingly becoming involved in designing digital experiments. Social scientists follow strict Institutional Review Board (IRB) procedures that govern the ethics of experiments involving people — such as informing them and requiring consent — but these rules don’t apply to technology companies. And that’s leading to questionable practices and potentially unreliable results.

Technology companies use their terms of service to authorize them to collect data without any obligation to inform people that they were involved, or provide any opportunity for them to withdraw. Thus, digital experimentation faces scant oversight."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03674-x

#GigEconomy #GigWork #Research #IRB #DigitalPlatforms #ResearchEthics

"What happened to Bill, and to dozens of other people whose experiences have been documented by disease advocates and on social media, is perfectly legal. Gaps in the United States’ genetic-nondiscrimination law mean that life, long-term-care, and disability insurers can obligate their customers to disclose genetic risk factors for disease and deny them coverage (or hike prices) based on the resulting information. It doesn’t matter whether those customers found out about their mutations from a doctor-ordered test or a 23andMe kit.

For decades, researchers have feared that people might be targeted over their DNA, but they weren’t sure how often it was happening. Now at least a handful of Americans are experiencing what they argue is a form of discrimination. And as more people get their genomes sequenced—and researchers learn to glean even more information from the results—a growing number of people may find themselves similarly targeted."

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/11/dna-genetic-discrimination-insurance-privacy/680626/

#USA #Health #Healthcare #Genes #GeneticDiscrimination

Albert Einstein (1949): "Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of capital is thus characterized by two main principles: first, means of production (capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of the “free labor contract” for certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present day economy does not differ much from “pure” capitalism."

https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/

#Socialism #Capitalism #WageSlavery

"Neoliberal ideology, marked by the irrational belief in the ability of markets to solve all problems, has deeply infiltrated public life, depoliticized critical issues and shifted education’s focus to workforce training. As education becomes increasingly privatized and subordinated to right-wing agendas, students are steered away from engaging with collective issues, ethics, or democratic participation. In the neoliberal university, students are encouraged to abandon any commitment beyond personal gain. Education is stripped of its civic purpose, no longer a path to responsible citizenship but a high-stakes financial transaction—a competition for entry into the lucrative world of hedge funds and exploitative financial ventures. This transformation reduces learning to mere careerism, undermining the university’s potential to cultivate engaged, socially conscious citizens.
(...)
The path forward for universities is clear: they must resist corporatization and recommit to fostering critical thinking, academic freedom, civic engagement, and democratic renewal. If higher education is to fulfill its democratic mission, it must resist the neoliberal plague and foster young people equipped to challenge inequities and envision a just, compassionate society."

https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/11/04/universities-in-dark-times-beyond-the-plague-of-neoliberal-fascism/

#Universities #HigherEd #Neoliberalism #CriticalThinking #Humanities #AcademicFreedom

"In our century, American politics has been blown open by the reverberating crises of neoliberalism and capitalist globalization. They have rebounded on our society and politics in four major forms: imperial blowback and endless warfare; deindustrialization and the hollowing out of American society; the rise of an engorged, predatory, and increasingly insane billionaire class, obsessed with eugenics and immortality; and the climate crisis, now a source of regular natural disasters and swelling refugee flows. At each juncture, the Democrats have attempted restoration: to manage the crisis, carry out the bailout, stitch things back together, and try to get back to normal. It is the form of this orientation, as much as substantive questions of culture, race, and gender, that seems to me the fundamental reason the Democrats are often experienced as a force of inhibition rather than empowerment by so many voters. And it is against this politics of containment that Trump’s obscenity comes to feel like a liberation for so many."

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/exit-right/

#USA #Trump #PresidentialElection2024 #DemocraticParty #Neoliberalism #Globalization

RT @KenRoth
UN humanitarian coordinator from northern Gaza: “This is not a place for humans to survive. This must end. This misery must end. This war must end. This is beyond imagination.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/11/1156556

"AT&T. Ticketmaster. Santander Bank. Neiman Marcus. Electronic Arts. These were not entirely isolated incidents. Instead, they were all hacked thanks to “infostealers,” a type of malware that is designed to pillage passwords and cookies stored in the victim’s browser. In turn, infostealers have given birth to a complex ecosystem that has been allowed to grow in the shadows and where criminals fulfill different roles. There are Russian malware coders continually updating their code; teams of professionals who use glitzy advertising to hire contractors to spread the malware across YouTube, TikTok, or GitHub; and English-speaking teenagers on the other side of the world who then use the harvested credentials to break into corporations. At the end of October, a collaboration of law enforcement agencies announced an operation against two of the world’s most prevalent stealers. But the market has been able to grow and mature so much that now law enforcement action against even one part of it is unlikely to make any lasting dent in the spread of infostealers.

Based on interviews with malware developers, hackers who use the stolen credentials, and a review of manuals that tell new recruits how to spread the malware, 404 Media has mapped out this industry. Its end result is that a download of an innocent-looking piece of software by a single person can lead to a data breach at a multibillion-dollar company, putting Google and other tech giants in an ever-escalating cat-and-mouse game with the malware developers to keep people and companies safe."

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-massive-crime-industry-thats-hacking-billion-dollar-companies/

#CyberSecurity #CyberCrime #Hacking #Malware #InfoStealers #DataBreaches

"The experiment used 554 resumes and 571 job descriptions taken from real-world documents.

The researchers then doctored the resumes, swapping in 120 first names generally associated with people who are male, female, Black and/or white. The jobs included were chief executive, marketing and sales manager, miscellaneous manager, human resources worker, accountant and auditor, miscellaneous engineer, secondary school teacher, designer, and miscellaneous sales and related worker.

The results demonstrated gender and race bias, said Wilson, as well as intersectional bias when gender and race are combined.

One surprising result: the technology preferred white men even for roles that employment data show are more commonly held by women, such as HR workers.

This is just the latest study to reveal troubling biases with AI models — and how to fix them is “a huge, open question,” Wilson said.

It’s difficult for researchers to probe commercial models as most are proprietary black boxes, she said. And companies don’t have to disclose patterns or biases in their results, creating a void of information around the problem."

https://www.geekwire.com/2024/ai-overwhelmingly-prefers-white-and-male-job-candidates-in-new-test-of-resume-screening-bias/

#AI #HR #Recruiting #AIBias #GenderBias #RaceBias

RT @textfiles
GUESS WHO'S BACK
BACK AGAIN
ARCHIVE'S BACK
TELL A FRIEND

https://archive.org

"Durante su charla en el evento Líderes con futuro, Carissa Véliz utilizó, ante un nutrido grupo de empresarios y expertos, varios casos que demuestran hasta qué punto el uso de las inteligencias artificiales ha de abordarse con cuidado. "No están entrenadas para pensar ni, por tanto, conocer sus propios límites de conocimiento", dijo. Para ella "son generadoras de respuestas estadísticas que no buscan la verdad sino la plausibilidad, la verosimilitud". O sea, para que nos la creamos.

Por ello, la ética es fundamental en el diseño de estas poderosas herramientas, y el asunto de la privacidad personal frente a las IA es nuclear. "No le pidas a una IA que te facilite tus propios datos personales, esos que ha utilizado durante su entrenamiento, porque no te los va a entregar, ya que su forma de actuar se basa en esos mismos datos", remarcó al tratar el asunto de la privacidad individual y las inteligencias artificiales, ávidas estas últimas de datos para poder funcionar.

"Sin privacidad no hay verdadera democracia", afirmó Véliz, que concluyó que "la pregunta sería cuánta vigilancia puede soportar una democracia"."

https://www.publico.es/ciencias/carissa-veliz-filosofa-oxford-ia-disenada-inventar-contenidos-verosimiles-no-buscar.html

#Tesla #CyberCab #DriverlessCars #EVs #Musk #RoboTaxis: "Back in 2019, Musk announced a million robotaxis would be on the road in 2020. They never arrived then, and likely won’t this time either. Tesla’s share price dropped 8% when markets opened the morning after the event, signaling investors are getting fed up with his lies as the company struggles to sell cars to customers who have plenty of other options. For a long time, it looked like Tesla would become the automotive startup that would make it. But plagued by a self-obsessed CEO, continued complaints of poor build quality, and an inability to deliver new products on time or on budget, its days may be numbered.

Elon Musk got used to getting by with bold statements and flashy visuals that might never go anywhere. But his ability to lie his way to success was premised on the goodwill he’d built up with the public and investors knowing they were still going to make their money at the end of the day. His descent into billionaire grievance politics and his decision to lash out at a world that expects him to play by the same rules that apply to everyone else may kill that goodwill once and for all. His fall can’t come soon enough, but will open more space for a future that looks nothing like the one he has in mind."

https://disconnect.blog/elon-musks-cybercab-recycles-a-decade-broken-promises/

"I am acutely aware that being the writer that I am, the non-Muslim that I am and the woman that I am, it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible for me to survive very long under the rule of Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iranian regime. But that is not the point here. The point is to educate ourselves about the history and the circumstances under which they came to exist. The point is that right now they are fighting against an ongoing genocide. The point is to ask ourselves whether a liberal, secular fighting force can go up against a genocidal war machine. Because, when all the powers of the world are against them, who do they have to turn to but God? I am aware that Hezbollah and the Iranian regime have vocal detractors in their own countries, some who also languish in jails or have faced far worse outcomes. I am aware that some of their actions – the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7th by Hamas – constitute war crimes. However, there cannot be an equivalence between this and what Israel and the United States are doing in Gaza, in the West Bank and now in Lebanon. The root of all the violence, including the violence of October 7th, is Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its subjugation of the Palestinian people. History did not begin on 7 October 2023.

I ask you, which of us sitting in this hall would willingly submit to the indignity that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to for decades? What peaceful means have the Palestinian people not tried? What compromise have they not accepted—other than the one that requires them to crawl on their knees and eat dirt?

Israel is not fighting a war of self-defence. It is fighting a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its Apartheid apparatus and tighten its control on Palestinian people and the region."

https://thewire.in/rights/palestine-israel-apartheid-arundhati-roy-pen-pinter-prize

#InternetArchive #CyberSecurity #Hacking #DDoS #DataBreach: "News of the breach began circulating Wednesday afternoon after visitors to archive.org began seeing a JavaScript alert created by the hacker, stating that the Internet Archive was breached.

"Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!," reads a JavaScript alert shown on the compromised archive.org site.

The text "HIBP" refers to is the Have I Been Pwned data breach notification service created by Troy Hunt, with whom threat actors commonly share stolen data to be added to the service."

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/internet-archive-hacked-data-breach-impacts-31-million-users/

#AI #GenerativeAI #ClimateChange #CarbonEmissions #FossilFuels: "So the AI companies are exacerbating the climate crisis in at least three ways:

- Selling tools to help oil companies AI tools to accelerate fossil fuel extraction.

- Running data centers that require ~10x the amount of electricity as Google

- Giving fossil fuel companies a reason—or an excuse—to build more power plants.

This makes it all the more pressing to deflate each of those bubbles. It’s a lot harder, after all, to decommission infrastructure than it is to not build it in the first place. And it should go without saying that, amid an accelerating climate crisis, we do not need to increase our energy use tenfold so that every tech giant can compete to shoddily automate call center and illustration jobs, inundate search results with tips for how to eat rocks safely, and load up our social feeds with dubious deepfakes.

The question is, how? The recent past offers one possible route. This isn’t the first time that the tech giants have been made to face scrutiny over their hypocritical climate policies—back in 2018, I wrote about the many ways that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon were selling AI and automation tools to fossil fuel companies. (The generative AI boom is like deja vu on steroids in this regard.) As the revelations of climate hypocrisy mounted, workers at those companies began public-facing pressure campaigns to get their employers to make good on their own climate promises. They made a climate-focused shareholder resolution, staged a public protest, and formed groups like the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. The workers won concessions—Google said it would stop selling certain AI tools to oil companies, and Amazon made an elaborate if unenforceable Climate Pledge—even if they were far from what’s needed."

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-is-revitalizing-the-fossil-fuels

I'm sorry but this analysis is terribly simplistic. Big Tech LOVES Intellectual Property, copyright, and specially patents. That's why these companies want to patent and extract licenses/subscriptions from everything that exists online. In the 90s, there were practically no large Internet companies (besides Yahoo!) and most technological infrastructure was decentralized - usenet newsgroups, IRC servers, BBSs, netizens movements, etc. Most technological innovations of that time were led by individual developers working for fun, as a hobby, or for mere survival.

While I'm sympathetic to leftist anti-big tech rhetoric, most of these discourses leave too many details out. You cannot create a false narrative based on misplaced assumptions, false narratives, and innuendos.

Digital rights were very important for the evolution of the Open Web and they should nowadays be considered as part of the human rights stack. Access to Knowledge (A2K) still continues to be critical for non-western countries, along with privacy and data protection rights.

Just because digital rights and the open-source movement were coopted by capitalism, that doesn't mean you should completely jettison them out. They are just a few pieces of a very large puzzle that must completed to surpass the conditions for the expansion of capitalism.

TL;DR: Leftists anti-big tech critics should read more marxist critical theory.

https://disconnect.blog/reclaiming-sovereignty-in-the-digital-age/

#InternetHistory #DigitalPreservation #InternetArchive #GoogleSearch #Google #InternetArchiving: "In a significant step forward for digital preservation, Google Search is now making it easier than ever to access the past. Starting today, users everywhere can view archived versions of webpages directly through Google Search, with a simple link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

How It Works
To access this new feature, conduct a search on Google as usual. Next to each search result, you’ll find three dots—clicking on these will bring up the “About this Result” panel. Within this panel, select “More About This Page” to reveal a link to the Wayback Machine page for that website.

Through this direct link, you’ll be able to view previous versions of a webpage via the Wayback Machine, offering a snapshot of how it appeared at different points in time."

https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/11/new-feature-alert-access-archived-webpages-directly-through-google-search/

@BeAware Sorry, I didn't wrote this report. And I think you're missing the point that Mastodon is a decentralized network. Personally, I abhor any kind of censorship unless we're talking about uninterrupted online harassment, threatening or doxxing. In any case, content moderation should always be a question for the administrator of the local instance where you have an account.