Notices by Julian Oliver (julianoliver@mastodon.social)

In my opening keynote for the Ada Symposium 2024, I conclusively and decisively argued that what we call 'A.I' is in fact a pet rock.

I also argued some other things.

https://vimeo.com/952557065

(lecture starts at 3:35)

#ai #ml #technologicaldeterminism

It appears that melting Antarctic sheets may result in larger volcanic eruptions This is due to the unloading of ice mass shifting pressure across vast chambers of magma.

"The researchers note that even if anthropogenic warming ceased immediately, the effects of ice mass unloading that the West Antarctic Rift System has already experienced will still affect volcanic behavior here for thousands of years to come."

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-antarctic-ice-sheets-larger-volcanic.html

#climatechange #geophysics #fossilfuels

The ML-enabled voice-theft space is heating up.

Here's an article from presenter Georgina Findlay, who had her own voice cloned and used in far-right disinformation videos on YouTube.

"I was horrified to find that eight out of 12 of the channel’s most recent videos had used my voice"

In the article Georgina also provides some good coverage of the state of 'AI' voice-cloning policy and mitigations.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/07/ai-clone-voice-far-right-fake-audio

#ai #ml #opsec

#GrapheneOS appears to be standing up to UK forensics, in this painful and "unprecedented" case which could see a UK journalist go to jail for not relinquishing the passphrase to his devices. Not only is withholding his basic human right, but he does it to protect his sources, and as ratified in the European Court of Human Rights.

https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/in-edicola/articoli/2025/01/02/british-journalist-could-face-years-in-prison-for-refusing-to-hand-over-his-passwords-to-the-police/7822432/

#humanrights #infosec #privacy

Apple fined for recording far more than it let on (just as Google and Amazon have done).

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/02/business/apple-siri-privacy-lawsuit/index.html

Real life spy stories are boring. Rather than dressing like a courier and picking locks to plant a wire in the living room, feds can just get a quiet warrant to listen in on the expensive spy device that the target themselves paid to install.

TY @Christina

#opsec

To take this as good news is to evidence a worrying lack of techno-political criticality.

Recent history gives us no indication quantum computing will not be rampantly abused, to the same ends of capturing and consolidating even more power in the hands of tech oligarchy and political elite. Any hope that it will be employed under strict regulatory controls to the betterment of people and planet is, at the present time, completely baseless.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/09/google-unveils-mindboggling-quantum-computing-chip

Just Stop Oil activist 77 yr old Gaie Delap was jailed for her part in a nonviolent protest, later let out to serve the rest of her punishment under home detention. But now she has been recalled to prison because her ankles & wrists are too small for the monitoring device strap.

"Gaie is sitting at home terrified with her suitcase packed waiting for a knock on the door from police. She has been unable to eat or sleep because of this"

The cruelty and absurdity of it all

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/07/just-stop-oil-activist-gaie-delap-facing-jail-recall-as-wrists-too-small-for-electronic-tag

@mro @gert I'm a huge proponent of HAM, Software Defined Radio solutions, packet radio etc, but in an emergency expertise - rarefied knowledge - becomes a single point of failure. When the local radio or mesh networking expert is trapped by flood or a barrage of bombs, the community that grew to depend on them is no better off.

Expertise must be distributed for there to be resilience in a community.

@mro @gert I believe Meshtastic (LoRa) is at the current time the best option. The community is already vast, meaning route redundancy and fault tolerance are a built in in many cities.

This is only a part of the node population
https://meshtastic.liamcottle.net/

LilyGo, SenseCAP T1000 and Station G2 (incl Nano G2) are plug and play for the less technically minded, have kilometers of line of sight (records are in the hundreds for Meshtastic) and an excellent app layer.

This whole thread, but on billboards https://toad.social/@wdlindsy/113549720571907492

This article on the uptake of beans in the West needs a correction. It seems to imply that while the "green revolution" trends as overall good for the planet, it comes with the cost of nitrogen-based fertilisers poisoning our atmosphere, oceans and rivers.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/22/its-like-a-secret-why-do-the-leguminati-want-to-change-the-way-we-eat

It's not so cut and dried.. (1/2)

The author overlooks the key fact that while 44% of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, livestock & their feedcrops account for 80% of all agricultural land use, with crops for humans accounting for just 16% of that surface.

Ref: https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture

Almost all Amazon Basin soya, for instance, is for export animal feed (EU, China esp). The bulk of the rest is biofuels.

The trick is to eat the bean before it gets to the cow (or pig, chicken, fish++).

(2/2)

What is meant by 'AI' now includes:

- Anything procedurally generated
- Some automation built from input
- Devices that take voice commands
- Text to speech (esp. if female voice with English accent)
- Speech to text (any accent)
- Autocomplete
- An NPC in a videogame
- Half of all apps for Android
- Your bank's next website
- Any serverside or closed source software you can hide some amount of complexity in
- Surprising photography
- Clippy

Update your taxonomies.

#ai #ml

What happened when the boss of COP29 (host Azerbaijan) was approached by an activist pretending to be a rep from a fictitious energy investment firm?

Caught on camera, he talks up potential deals with state fossil fuel giant Socar (whose board he's on), Azerbaijan's plans to increase gas production, & otherwise excitedly betrays the entire COP charter.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crmzvdn9e18o

#climate

A dark day indeed.

Never forget Big Tech's hand in this, enabling and inciting a storm of hatred, fear and disinformation. They had the means to intervene, yet made profit their choice.

No one is going to build the world we want but us.

You're on a ship hurtling through space and your crew's best engineers report that critical sub-systems - from water filtration, through to HVAC and food pods - are all failing. Evidence of sabotage. What do you do?

World's governments:

"Governments failed to reach a consensus [...] Many were forced to leave the talks early to catch flights, and negotiations were suspended at 8.30am when fewer than half of the countries were present"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/03/cop16-ends-in-disarry-and-indecision-despite-biodiversity-breakthroughs

#biodiversity

Good shortread by Goodin on the clandestine tracking platform Location X. Sold to government agencies, it supposedly exploits the unique 'advertising ID' accessible to the app layer on all Android phones, and (with optional user input) on iOS. The article has a brief mitigation walkthrough for phone owners.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/10/phone-tracking-tool-lets-government-agencies-follow-your-every-move/

Thanks to @Christina for the share

#infosec #privacy

@steve Same. I described myself as a "migrant" or "immigrant" while living in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Spain and other places, but would get looks. 'Ex pat' for my skin colour, apparently. In both Sweden and Germany I was told "you are one of us".

We're told we "need" 'AI'/ML just like we were told we needed blockchains, VR, Web3 and the so-called metaverse - these solutions looking for problems. The difference with ML however is that it does solve some big problems very well, the most significant of which (and primary investment driver) is the Late Capitalist project of decoupling skill from People.

@aral Looks great. Let me know when you update it and I'll give it a push.