Notices by Meredith Whittaker (mer__edith@mastodon.world)

@brayd @signalapp We will never weaken encryption, add a backdoor, bow or scrape, etc. We would rather shut down or leave a market. Our position does not change based on jurisdiction.

Not lost on me that it's nonprofit tech, https://app.watchduty.org, showing up & actually working in the midst of the LA fires (donate to them!)

Meanwhile platforms fail to surface key news, vital info is paywalled...

As I've been saying, we need a new tech paradigm, yesterday!

This is desperate product manager trying to ship something to meet a company OKR they don't understand and don't believe in coded

https://www.404media.co/instagram-begins-randomly-showing-users-ai-generated-images-of-themselves/

@_dm Why do you assume this?

@_dm Arguably fake users making fake content we click on, that clicks on us, is fraudulent traffic. And allegations of funny accounting, boring on/constituting fraud have been leveled at Meta for years. Since Meta owns the 'data' and the process of creating it, with almost no accountability, it's not clear to me that this is a bright line that won't be (hasn't already been) crossed.

Meta making fake AI bot users is tedious, death drive-coded AI desperation

That aside, the Q I want answered is how fake 'users' will be (dis)counted when calculating ad clicks, auction prices? You know, the already sketchy pseudoscience on which the surveillance biz model house o' cards rests...

Complete knowledge of the full majesty of universal creation in all its divine facets is when I own an island.

@MrBerard @CCC Quite seriously, I would never. I write (to paraphrase Didion) to know what I think, and I accept talks at venues I respect whose thinking I want to engage with in order to have deadlines that help me move forward with certain inquiries. I would NEVER schlepp myself to Hamburg during the most relaxed time of year to read what a bot wrote at an hour dangerously close to my bedtime!

Sitting at the dining table, busy condensing 60 pages of unruly notes into 15 pages of more or less coherent text for my upcoming talk at @CCC.

Every so often I glance up from my computer on this, Christmas Eve, and catch the eye of a family member whose suspicious gaze lets me know that they still don't quite believe that there is in fact a real conference, attended by real people like me, scheduled on Dec 27th.

🛑🤡 PSA: This is disingenuous marketing. Signal chats can't be 'monitored' by anyone not in those chats.

Dressing up "joining groups via publicly posted links, then exfiltrating group data" as an offensive 'cybercapability' borders on misinfo, and confuses/scares ppl who rely on Signal for robust privacy.

https://intel471.com/blog/expanding-source-coverage-adding-signal-chats-to-threat-intelligence

@eighthave eh, I mean...read the long thread of comments and you'll see many people who disagree. A shitty culture in general isn't erased by a subset of kind people operating within that culture.

📢NEW: 'Open' AI systems aren't open. The vague term, combined w AI hype is (mis)shaping policy & practice, assuming 'open source' AI democratizes access & addresses power concentration. It doesn't.

@sarahbmyers, @davidthewid & I correct the record👇
https://nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08141-1

I wrote a little end of year manifestation for you'all. MAY IT EVER BE THUS!

https://www.wired.com/story/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-big-tech/

Now that "scale is all we need" has predictably faltered...

1. Small AI models often perform better in context.

2. Obsession w bigness has bad consequences, from climate, to power concentration, to research capture.

Me +
@GaelVaroquaux
@sashaluccioni

arxiv.org/abs/2409.14160

Signal has been running on Signal video for a long time, and the addition of call links about a month ago was a MASSIVE quality of life improvement.

Seriously, give them a try! Imagine, not sharing the contents of your daily standup with a large video conferencing company!

Tired of zoom, meet, w/e video conferencing software collecting your data?

Signal's got you❤️

NEW: call links let you start a video call with your fave Signal users easily, no group needed. Announcing these, and other improvements to calling here👇

https://signal.org/blog/call-links/

I remember Google+, and the idee fixe and mad hype around it. (Google was afraid of Facebook.) G+ was a ghost town. But for the first year or so the G+ team reported astronomical engagement numbers. Huhh?

Finally we learned they were counting every G+ notification dropped at the top of Gmail as an "engagement."

Anyway, I wonder how they're measuring this...

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-earnings-q3-2024-new-code-created-by-ai-2024-10

📣 New Paper! w/@HeidyKhlaaf + @sarahbmyers

We put the narrative on AI risks & NatSec under a microscope, finding the focus on hypothetical AI bioweapons is warping policy and ignoring real & serious harms of current AI use in surveillance, targeting, etc.

Instead of crafting solutions for hypothetical harms, we advocate focusing on already existing and very significant safety issues--namely AI’s reliance on PII & the vulns created by foundation models' use in NatSec.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14831

Apparently there's an imposter pretending to be me and messaging infosec and infosec-adjacent folks cold on Signal (or, at least these are the people reporting it).

So, for the record I will NEVER cold message people on Signal. If you don't know me, or we didn't connect explicitly via a contact or at an event, I will not reach out to you. Ever. I have, like, better things to do, for one...

Case in point: there's no way to build a backdoor that only the "good guys" can use.

When the entire technical community says that the EU's ChatControl legislation + similar pose serious cybersecurity threats, we're not exaggerating for effect.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/u-s-wiretap-systems-targeted-in-china-linked-hack-327fc63b?st=byoB7m