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

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
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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.

#Fediverse #Mastodon #Decentralization #SocialMedia #Microblogging #FediverseGovernance: "We were drawn to this research question because the socio-technical aspects of Fediverse governance often seem opaque from the outside—from outside any given server, and especially from outside the Fediverse.
(...)
Above all, we wanted to understand more about what happens behind the curtain of Fediverse server operation, and distribute this knowledge widely to help other server teams level up together—and perhaps to uncover characteristics of server governance that might be meaningful to others trying to build sustainable alternatives to centralized commercial platforms, whether on the Fediverse or elsewhere.

Having completed our initial inquiry, we’re optimistic that:

- thoughtfully governed, medium-sized Fediverse servers are especially well positioned to offer a model of high-context, culturally sensitive online community that outperforms most interactions with centralized platform governance;

- the Fediverse’s combined emphasis on the sovereignty of local norms and a federated form of network diplomacy can offer a real and optimistic challenge to the dead end of centralized content moderation at scale; and

- the emergent processes and technologies of the Fediverse can form a part of what media researcher (and Fediverse server operator) Nathan Schneider calls the “governable stack,” which he defines as “webs of tools and techniques that can support self-governing online communities.”

But, crucially, we don’t think that the Fediverse is likely to realize these potential benefits without ongoing and intentional emphasis on—and funding for—addressing the cultural, financial, legal, and technical governance needs and gaps highlighted by our research participants."

https://fediverse-governance.github.io/

#AI #GenerativeAI #DataCenters #Water #WaterScarcity: "The building of new data centres is increasing demand for water resources. Some data centres are presently located in areas of water stress or are likely to be in the future. Developing cooling technologies which minimise or do not require water is becoming increasingly important. Perhaps AI will find a scalable solution to this problem."

https://planet-tracker.org/ai-needs-to-reduce-its-water-dependency/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #Nvidia #Apple #Microsoft: "Nvidia Corp., the world’s biggest chipmaker, has discussed joining a funding round for OpenAI that would value the artificial intelligence startup at more than $100 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. also have been in talks about participating in the financing, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. The round would be led by Thrive Capital, which is investing about $1 billion, Bloomberg reported earlier this week. Nvidia has discussed investing about $100 million, two of the people said.

If the discussions move forward, it would mean the three most valuable tech companies are all backing OpenAI, maker of the groundbreaking ChatGPT chatbot. Microsoft was already OpenAI’s biggest funder, having invested roughly $13 billion."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-29/nvidia-has-held-discussions-about-joining-openai-s-funding-round

#EVs #Surveillance #Privacy #DataProtection #Cars: "A modern connected car generates nearly 25 gigabytes of data per hour, per S&P Global Mobility, with that data ranging from location and driving history to even more sensitive personally identifiable information. That’s an unfathomably large amount of data to most of us given that even the flashiest, most picture-heavy PDF I can find on my hard drive is roughly 0.06% of that.

Many of the basic features you interact with in a newer car are an opportunity to collect data, including “embedded features including geolocation and navigation, companion apps, biometrics, voice recognition, on-board diagnostics and driver assistance,” notes S&P Mobility Senior Research Analyst Vivek Beriwal. “Additionally, cars can collect data in the background via cameras, microphones, sensors, and connected phones and apps.”

Some of the data collected by cars or included in connected systems’ terms of service may strike users as a bit creepy. In Honda’s vehicle data privacy notice, for example, the company says it collects precise vehicle location information at specific points in time that’s accurate to within a radius of 1,850 feet or less — precisely the kind of data that could be dangerous if the wrong person gains access to it. Modern Hondas can also store data on what you’ve searched for through the car’s infotainment system, recordings of vocal commands you’ve given the car, and call history information for any phones connected through the car’s systems (although call data and previous navigation destinations can be wiped through the infotainment system)."

https://www.cars.com/articles/how-to-keep-your-car-from-sharing-your-sensitive-data-behind-your-back-483328/

"This is what happened: within hours of a local 17-year-old boy being arrested for the mass-stabbings, untrue narratives started circulating on social media naming him as “Ali al-Shakati”—a Muslim migrant to the UK—alleging that he was on an MI6 watchlist, and that he was an asylum seeker who was known to the Liverpool mental health services.

None of this was true, but research by Dr Marc Owen Jones, an expert in digital authoritarianism, has traced how this kind of speculation rapidly notched up 27m impressions on social media.

The self-proclaimed misogynist and alleged rapist Andrew Tate, with nearly 10m followers on X, posted a false image of the supposed attacker, claiming he was “straight off a boat”—even though by then the police had told us he had been born in Cardiff 17 years ago. But that, according to Tate, was a lie promoted by what he calls “the Matrix”.

One of the most prominent amplifiers of this untrue information was a shadowy organisation calling itself Channel3 Now. Quite who is behind this outfit is unclear. Investigative journalists soon found that it had started life as a place for Russian car rally videos. It may be now run out of an address in Pakistan or the US. That’s the joy of Musk’s beloved “independent media”—you haven’t got a clue who half of the fabulists are."

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/67463/elon-musks-misinformation-machine-made-the-horrors-of-southport-much-worse

#SocialMedia #SocialNetworks #ActivityPub #Fediverse #Mastodon #ATProtocol #Threads #Bluesky: "Two major ecosystems have emerged in the wake, both encouraging the variety and experimentation of the earlier web. The first, built on ActivityPub protocol, is called the Fediverse. While it includes many different kinds of websites, Mastodon and Threads have taken off as alternatives for Twitter that use this protocol. The other is the AT Protocol, powering the Twitter alternative Bluesky.

These protocols, a shared language between computer systems, allow websites to exchange information. It’s a simple concept you’re benefiting from right now, as protocols enable you to read this post in your choice of app or browser. Opening this freedom to social media has a huge impact, letting everyone send and receive posts their own preferred way. Even better, these systems are open to experiment and can cater to every niche, while still connecting to everyone in the wider network. You can leave the dead malls of platform capitalism, and find the services which cater to you.

To save you some trial and error, we have outlined some differences between these options and what that might mean for them down the road.""

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/whats-difference-between-mastodon-bluesky-and-threads

Once again, people who suggest that nuclear energy can be a solution for fighting climate change are using ideology in place of logic and science. It's a total comeback to pre-enlightenment times and it should be a shame for everybody who praises rational thinking.

#Nuclear #NuclearEnergy #ClimateChange #FossilFuels: "The climate movement has rightly focused its efforts on achieving a fast, fair and full phase out of fossil fuels with remarkable successes, although major fights are still ahead of us. Renewable energy has seen massive growth rates in many European countries and this development is a win for everyone: People as they benefit from lower energy prices, communities where they are part of benefit sharing schemes and the climate due to much reduced greenhouse gas emissions. We therefore conclude and demand:

- Nuclear energy is undermining renewables due to the aforementioned issues and must not be portrayed as an alternative or partner for renewables in the energy transition.
- New nuclear energy in Europe is too slow, and too expensive to meaningfully contribute to the decarbonisation of the energy system by 2040. This pathway is a distraction which only delays fossil fuel phase-out and renewables uptake.
- Small Modular Reactors are an unproven technology and, like conventional nuclear reactor designs, are unable to contribute meaningfully to decarbonisation. If developed, these units would increase the price for electricity, the levels of radioactive waste and risk the proliferation of nuclear materials.
(...)
- Every euro invested in nuclear is a euro not invested in renewables and energy efficiency. For this reason, public finance should remain inaccessible to nuclear, as it should be prioritised on cost-effective, sustainable solutions. This includes the EU’s Multiannual Financial Framework and EU funds such as the Just Transition Fund, Modernisation Fund, Innovation Fund, InvestEU, etc..."

https://caneurope.org/myth-buster-nuclear-energy/

#SolarStorm #GPS #Farming #JohnDeere: "The solar storm that brought the aurora borealis to large parts of the United States this weekend also broke critical GPS and precision farming functionality in tractors and agricultural equipment during a critical point of the planting season, 404 Media has learned. These outages caused many farmers to fully stop their planting operations for the moment.

One chain of John Deere dealerships warned farmers that the accuracy of some of the systems used by tractors are “extremely compromised,” and that farmers who planted crops during periods of inaccuracy are going to face problems when they go to harvest, according to text messages obtained by 404 Media and an update posted by the dealership. The outages highlight how vulnerable modern tractors are to satellite disruptions, which experts have been warning about for years."

https://www.404media.co/solar-storm-knocks-out-tractor-gps-systems-during-peak-planting-season/