Miguel Afonso Caetano

Senior Technical Writer @ Opplane (Lisbon, Portugal). PhD in Communication Sciences (ISCTE-IUL). Past: technology journalist, blogger & communication researcher.

#TechnicalWriting #WebDev #WebDevelopment #OpenSource #FLOSS #SoftwareDevelopment #IP #PoliticalEconomy #Communication #Media #Copyright #Music #Cities #Urbanism

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relay.mostr.pub

relay.shitforce.one

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Last Notes

2024-06-05 11:15:57

RT @emilymbender
"a potential gold mine for criminal hackers or domestic abusers who may physically access their victim’s device."
In 2024 it *still* somehow isn't standard practice to ask in the design process: Are we building the killer app for domestic abusers?
https://www.wired.com/story/total-recall-windows-recall-ai/

2024-05-12 11:22:37

RT @jathansadowski
So weird how impacts are impossible to foresee and too complex to nail down, but the benefits are always inevitable and straightforward—as long as we just stand aside and cheer.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-05-10/openai-coo-says-it-s-too-soon-to-see-ai-s-full-impact-on-economy

2024-05-11 13:10:31

RT @parismarx
Begging the DoJ to make my dreams come true by nailing Elon Musk for securities and wire fraud 🙏
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/8/24151881/tesla-justice-investigation-securities-wire-fraud-self-driving

2024-05-09 23:02:24

RT @direitosdig
A videovigilância espalha-se pelo país como cancro, sem critério, a custos exorbitantes.
Um bom exemplo é autarquia de Mourão: está a implementar videovigilância pelas ruas, mas não consegue apontar uma única ocorrência de crime no último mês.
https://odigital.sapo.pt/mourao-autarquia-vai-investir-cerca-de-80-me-em-cerca-de-oito-a-dez-cameras-de-videovigilancia/

2024-05-01 14:06:58

RT @JuliaAngwin
Thrilled to see the EU commission explicitly supporting the importance of journalist access to platform data in its inquiry into Meta.
H/t @brandonsilverm
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_2373

2024-04-30 13:24:29

- reply

@npub13n0…pzzm Here, an archived version of the article: https://archive.fo/3uVz5

2024-04-10 11:12:01

Blockchain = Banha da Cobra
RT @direitosdig
A acompanhar atentamente nos próximos anos: os € 43.880.000,00 (quarenta e três milhões oitocentos e oitenta mil euros) do PRR que serão enterrados em blockchainices.
Ainda vamos ter saudade do tempo em que ia tudo para autoestradas #PRR
https://transparencia.gov.pt/pt/fundos-europeus/prr/beneficiarios-projetos/projeto/02/C05-i01.01/2022.PC644918095-00000033/

2024-03-29 14:17:26

RT @fightfortheftr
TODAY: 20+ groups including ❤️Fight @reproaction @mozilla @RHAP1 @NatAbortionFed @EFF @accessnow @OTI released a letter demanding @cvspharmacy @Walgreens protect patients’ privacy and stop sharing their health data with law enforcement without a warrant. https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2024-03-28-joint-letter-calling-on-cvs-and-walgreens-to-protect-patient-privacy-and-medical-records/

2024-03-24 12:57:39

RT @npub1gsk…m8f2
the whole of society is becoming a giant beta test for this idiot technology
https://engadget.com/google-will-start-showing-ai-powered-search-results-to-users-who-didnt-opt-in-093036257.html?guccounter=1

2024-03-20 22:27:27

RT @AINowInstitute
Last week, we joined several organizations including
@openmarkets to submit comments to the European Commission on competition and generative AI, outlining the strategies tech giants are using to consolidate their hold on the market. Read more here: https://ainowinstitute.org/publication/joint-submission-to-the-european-commissions-consultation-on-competition-and-generative-ai

2024-01-26 22:25:43

#USA #FTC #AI #GenerativeAI #Antitrust #Competition: "Today, the Federal Trade Commission announced an inquiry, called a 6(b) study, into generative artificial intelligence investments and partnerships with major cloud service providers. The agency will review these corporate arrangements with AI providers to “build a better internal understanding of these relationships and their impact on the competitive landscape.”
The FTC sent compulsory information requests to Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI, the maker of chatGPT. Public Knowledge applauds this FTC action to investigate potential competitive concerns where Big Tech and AI meet and looks forward to reviewing the results of the study."
https://publicknowledge.org/public-knowledge-commends-ftc-move-to-investigate-big-tech-ai-partnerships/

2024-01-05 23:40:45

#AI #GenerativeAI #Copyright #IP #OpenAI #ChatGPT #NYT #News: "Ultimately, the outcomes may also hinge on the perceived utility and prevalence of the technology. The New York Times seeks to destroy all models trained with its content, but I doubt it will come to that, though I could be wrong. As someone noted on Twitter (apologies for not having the reference), judges’ decisions are influenced by personal experience, suggesting that the widespread use of ChatGPT by judges and their families might reduce the likelihood of the technology being completely abolished.
Furthermore, even if US cases are resolved unfavourably for generative AI companies, the global landscape is vast. It’s possible that other countries might seize the opportunity to become more accommodating to AI developments."
https://www.technollama.co.uk/the-new-york-times-lawsuit-the-case-and-its-wider-implications

2023-11-11 12:01:15

#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #Freelancing #Copywriting #GraphicDesign #Unemployment: "US researchers showed that within a few months of the launch of ChatGPT, copywriters and graphic designers on major online freelancing platforms saw a significant drop in the number of jobs they got, and even steeper declines in earnings. This suggested not only that generative AI was taking their work, but also that it devalues the work they do still carry out.
Most strikingly, the study found that freelancers who previously had the highest earnings and completed the most jobs were no less likely to see their employment and earnings decline than other workers. If anything, they had worse outcomes. In other words, being more skilled was no shield against loss of work or earnings."
https://www.ft.com/content/b2928076-5c52-43e9-8872-08fda2aa2fcf

2023-11-05 13:13:39

#Surveillance #Privacy #Biometrics #FacialRecognition #Clearview: "Even though facial recognition technology can be used for good purposes such as criminal investigations, the dangers it poses to privacy rights could outweigh its benefits, said Hill. Both the right to privacy and users’ right to control their personal information shared on social media platforms should be protected, she added. New laws to protect those rights should be modeled after regulations that made wiretapping, or the recording of communications between parties without their consent, illegal.
Recent privacy laws in Europe restrict how personal data is collected and handled by social media platforms. And in 2008, Illinois passed the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), an initiative led by the ACLU of Illinois, which guarantees that individuals are in control of their own biometric data (i.e., fingerprints, iris scans, DNA) and prohibits private companies from collecting it unless they inform users and obtain their written consent. Technology is not going to slow down, so the law needs to catch up and regulate its uses, said Hill.
“I don’t believe that just because a technology exists and is capable of doing this, we just have to accept it,” said Hill. “Part of why I wrote this book was because I am worried that this is just getting out there and we’re not doing enough to choose the world that we want to live in. We’re letting the technology dictate it.”" https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/10/how-facial-recognition-app-poses-threat-to-privacy-civil-liberties/

2023-10-25 10:26:09

#Germany #Jews #Antisemitism #Palestine: "Germany’s commitment to memory is undeniably impressive; no other global power has worked nearly as hard to apprehend its past. Yet while the world praises its culture of contrition, some Germans—in particular, Jews, Arabs, and other minorities—have been sounding the alarm that this approach to memory has largely been a narcissistic enterprise, with strange and disturbing consequences. The leftist German Jewish writer Fabian Wolff argued in a viral 2021 essay that Germany’s attachment to the past had diminished the space for Jewish life in the present: Germans have no place for “Jewish life [that] exists outside their field of vision and their way of knowing,” he wrote, or for “Jewish conversations about Jewish issues [that] have a meaning beyond and apart from what these Germans themselves think or would like to hear."
https://jewishcurrents.org/bad-memory-2

2023-10-24 11:55:36

#Regulation #State #Government #Antitrust #Competition: "In Public Choice Theory, the biggest companies in an industry have the strongest interest in capturing the regulator, and they will work harder – and have more resources – than anyone else, be they members of the public, workers, or smaller rivals. This inevitably leads to capture, where the state becomes an arm of the dominant companies, wielded by them to prevent competition:
(...)
This is regulatory nihilism. It supposes that the only reason you weren't killed by your dinner, or your antilock brakes, or your collapsing roof, is that you just got lucky – and not because we have actual, good, sound regulations that use evidence to protect us from the endless lethal risks we face. These nihilists suppose that making good regulation is either a myth – like ancient Egyptian sorcery – or a lost art – like the secret to embalming Pharaohs.
But it's clearly possible to make good regulations – especially if you don't allow companies to form monopolies or cartels. What's more, failing to make public regulations isn't the same as getting rid of regulation. In the absence of public regulation, we get private regulation, run by companies themselves."
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/23/getting-stuff-done/#praxis

2023-10-21 11:41:49

RT @bcmerchant
Apple cancelled Jon Stewart's show, which was looking into a segment on AI and China. Very admirable Stewart walked rather than "align" with Apple's views and demand for control—but it's yet another reflection of big tech's power to control what we see.
https://theverge.com/2023/10/19/23924549/jon-stewart-apple-ai-china-cancel

2023-10-10 22:51:20

#BigTech #Disinformation #AdTech #News #Media #SocialMedia #Journalism: "Big Tech’s business model is harming us all by amplifying hate and lies. Our children are hurting, our rights are being abused and we are losing our shared reality. This means we cannot come together to solve big challenges like climate change, sexism and racism.
This is one of the most complex challenges of our time. But we can step up. It’s time to reclaim our rights in the digital age.
The 10-Point Plan to address the information crisis is a manifesto for change. It will transform the internet from a space monopolised by profiteering Big Tech companies to one that puts our rights first. Signed by Nobel laureates and over 100 organisations and individuals, it charts a path to a world where technology serves humanity.
Sign it. Use it. Amplify it."
https://10pointplan.org/

2023-10-10 22:29:53

#EU #USA #Cybersecurity #Spyware #Predator #PredatorFiles #Intellexa: "Shocking spyware attacks have been attempted against civil society, journalists, politicians and academics in the European Union (EU), USA and Asia, according to a major new investigation by Amnesty International. Among the targets of Predator spyware are United Nations (UN) officials, a Senator and Congressman in the USA and even the Presidents of the European Parliament and Taiwan. The investigation is part of the ‘Predator Files’ project, in partnership with the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) and backed by additional in-depth reporting by Mediapart and Der Spiegel.
 Between February and June 2023, social media platforms X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook were used to publicly target at least 50 accounts belonging to 27 individuals and 23 institutions. The cyber-surveillance weapon used for targeting was an invasive spyware tool called Predator, which was developed and sold by the Intellexa alliance. This alliance, which has advertised itself as “EU based and regulated”, is a complex and often changing group of companies that develops and sells surveillance products, including Predator spyware. 
 Predator is a type of highly invasive spyware. This means that once it has infiltrated a device it has unfettered access to its microphone and camera and all its data such as contacts, messages, photos and videos, while the user is entirely unaware. Such spyware cannot, at present, be independently audited or limited in its functionality to only those functions that are necessary and proportionate to a specific use. "  
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/global-predator-files-spyware-scandal-reveals-brazen-targeting-of-civil-society-politicians-and-officials/

2023-10-06 20:38:39

#Cybersecurity #23AndMe #DNA #Privacy #Hacking #DataTheft #DataProtection: "The officials said the information obtained may have included users’ display name, profile photo, profile sex, birth year, location, predicted relationships to their match, the percent DNA match and number of shared genetic segments and portions of their genetic ancestry results, including haplogroups, which provide information about ancestry.
The exact scope of the data obtained by the attacker remains unclear and CyberScoop has not been able to verify the authenticity of the data offered for sale.
After the data was first offered for sale on Sunday, the listing was pulled down. The poster reemerged on Wednesday offering what they described as data on “tailored ethnic groupings, individualized data sets, pinpointed origin estimations, haplogroup details, phenotype information, photographs, links to hundreds of potential relatives, and most crucially, raw data profiles.”"
https://cyberscoop.com/23andme-user-data-theft/?utm_content=266994582&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&hss_channel=tw-720664083767435264

2023-10-06 20:23:12

#Cybersecurity #Spyware #Germany #Predator #Surveillance: "Now, for the first time, documents obtained by DER SPIEGEL and the French investigative portal Mediapart and shared with their partners in the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) provide deep insight into the secret world of inventors, financiers and vendors of fearsome spy weapons like Predator. Specialists with Amnesty International assisted the reporting with technical analysis.
Particularly alarming is the realization that many of the tracks left by the unscrupulous spyware providers lead to Germany, the self-proclaimed cradle of data protection and informational self-determination. There, an extremely well-connected Hamburg entrepreneur invested in two companies involved in the scandal, and an art-loving patron from Berlin supplied significant amounts of money to support the development of the spyware.
Our reporting into the Predator Files took several months and is based on thousands of court documents, interrogation transcripts and confidential company presentations. It has revealed that European business executives have earned a fortune by equipping countries that flout the rule of law and despots with the latest surveillance tools for more than a decade.
Financed, supported and advised by people in Germany, these companies ultimately joined forces in an alliance that helped to spy on a grand scale. Known as the Intellexa Alliance, the collaboration is likely one of the most mysterious and dangerous ventures in Europe."
https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/the-predator-files-european-spyware-consortium-supplied-despots-and-dictators-a-2fd8043f-c5c1-4b05-b5a6-e8f8b9949978?sara_ref=re-so-tw-sh

2023-09-27 01:34:44

Vou andar por aqui nos próximos dias. Pelo que tenho andado a ler, parece-me que a cidade já viu piores dias e está muito lentamente a recuperar... Ainda assim, não tem absolutamente nada a ver com Detroit, Saint Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans ou até mesmo Chicago. Tirando esta última, essas cidades são manifestamente inseguras.
#USA #California #SanFrancisco: "Like any city, San Francisco is a complicated place with many story lines. It has a property-crime epidemic, but low rates of violent crime. It has a homelessness crisis and is pleading with a federal court for more leeway to clear tent encampments, but according to the most recent homeless count, there was a 15 percent drop in the homeless population living on its sidewalks between 2019 and 2022. Its downtown recovery has been glacial, but its unemployment rate is low at 3.6 percent.
The city has a record-high 31 percent office vacancy rate, and some prominent retail departures have drawn attention. But optimists say they hope these trends will open up space in the city for artists, nonprofit groups and possibly colleges.
There is no way to positively spin the drug crisis; 84 people died of overdoses in August, putting the city on track to tally 845 drug deaths this year, the most on record.
Since the pandemic upended life in downtowns across the nation, perhaps no major American city has suffered as severe a reputational hit as San Francisco.
But there are hopeful signs. Several new parks have opened in the city in recent years, including Tunnel Tops, where families flock on sunny weekends to picnic, stroll and take in views of the bay. The city has closed a couple of scenic thoroughfares to cars, most notably John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park, where people can now bike, roller skate or play a weathered grand piano.
While downtown struggles, previously sleepy neighborhoods are thriving."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/25/us/san-francisco-reputation.html

2023-09-26 21:44:20

RT @superwuster
That a federal judge took Facebook's collection of personal info from children to be a form of constitutional "speech" shows how insane First Amendment jurisprudence has become. An unethical ruling that may well be the Hammer v. Dagenhart of our age
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/18/california-online-child-safety-law/

2023-09-24 11:34:50

#USA #Disinformation #Misinformation #SocialMedia #ConspiracyTheories #Science: "Academics, universities and government agencies are overhauling or ending research programs designed to counter the spread of online misinformation amid a legal campaign from conservative politicians and activists who accuse them of colluding with tech companies to censor right-wing views.
The escalating campaign — led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans in Congress and state government — has cast a pall over programs that study not just political falsehoods but also the quality of medical information online.
Facing litigation, Stanford University officials are discussing how they can continue tracking election-related misinformation through the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a prominent consortium that flagged social media conspiracies about voting in 2020 and 2022, several participants told The Washington Post. The coalition of disinformation researchers may shrink and also may stop communicating with X and Facebook about their findings."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/23/online-misinformation-jim-jordan/

2023-09-23 03:44:52

#AI #Fauxtomation #GhostWork: "AI’s development so far has been based on the exploitation of workers and users around the world, performing what anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computational social scientist Siddharth Suri call ghost work. This term refers to the undervalued human labor utilized to develop and maintain the automation of websites and apps. Ghost work is characterized by on-demand, short-term projects or tasks performed globally by precarized workers through platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk and specialized companies like Sama. These workers, usually vulnerable people from Asia, Latin America, and Africa, are paid less than $2 per hour to generate and label data that trains AI models. Moreover, users who validate algorithmic outputs or help perfect systems usually do it for free. Ghost work is often outsourced, hidden, or rendered invisible by the tech companies who request it. As Noopur Raval argues, we must ask ourselves how and for whom this work is invisible and what happens when workers are finally seen. In light of these questions, we delve into three nuanced layers of invisibility that pervade data work: the unpaid work performed by users, human workers pretending to be AI systems, and the different forms of exploitation of vulnerable communities globally. Finally, we explore potential avenues for not only rendering this labor visible but also transforming the material conditions under which it takes place."
https://just-tech.ssrc.org/articles/data-work-and-its-layers-of-invisibility/

2023-09-23 02:38:00

- reply

"Weitzman got his gig after Matthew Stoller, a noted critic of Google's power, decided to hire someone to attend every day of the trial and write about it for his email newsletter Big, which focuses on monopoly issues in tech and beyond and has about 100,000 subscribers. “You can’t cover anti-monopoly politics without recognizing how important this case is,” Stoller says.
A rare combination of experience as a sports section editor of his school paper at the University of Pennsylvania and a fascination with antitrust law helped Weitzman secure the gig. He packed up in Philadelphia and has signed a monthlong sublet within walking distance of the court, but has not figured out where exactly he’ll live for the remainder of the trial. Some new law graduates travel the world in the few months before starting their first job. Weitzman is making a muggy commute to an uncomfortable bench in the courtroom’s public gallery, working up to dozen hours a day. “I’m not complaining at all,” he says.
Weitzman’s write-up is summarized in Big occasionally and sent out in full each day in a temporary offshoot newsletter on Substack, Big Tech on Trial, which had about 2,700 subscribers after the trial’s first week. He is being paid by Stoller and the American Economic Liberties Project, a nonpartisan anti-monopoly advocacy group where Stoller is director of research."
https://www.wired.com/story/law-geeks-exposing-google-secretive-antitrust-trial/

2023-09-21 10:33:37

#Cybersecurity #China #USBDrives #Malware: "At the mWise security conference today, researchers from cybersecurity firm Mandiant revealed that a China-linked hacker group they’re calling UNC53 has managed to hack at least 29 organizations around the world since the beginning of last year using the old-school approach of tricking their staff into plugging malware-infected USB drives into computers on their networks. While those victims span the United States, Europe, and Asia, Mandiant says many of the infections appear to originate from multinational organizations’ Africa-based operations, in countries including Egypt, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana, and Madagascar. In some cases, the malware—in fact, several variants of a more than decade-old strain known as Sogu—appears to have traveled via USB stick from shared computers in print shops and internet cafés, indiscriminately infecting computers in a widespread data dragnet."
https://www.wired.com/story/china-usb-sogu-malware/

2023-09-20 20:39:03

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https://pure.tue.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/197416841/20220325_Appelbaum_hf.pdf

2023-09-19 10:53:25

#Luddites #Neoluddism #Tech #BigTech: "I test drove the first-generation Tesla Roadster. I once lived on Soylent powder shakes for a month. My Twitter account is almost old enough to drive. I wrote a book about the iPhone.
Also, I’m a Luddite.
That’s not the contradiction that it might sound like. The original Luddites did not hate technology. Most were skilled machine operators. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, what they objected to were the specific ways that tech was being used to undermine their status, upend their communities and destroy their livelihoods. So they took sledgehammers to the mechanized looms used to exploit them.
It is that spirit that I’ve come to appreciate in the age of tech monopolies and generative artificial intelligence. The kind of visionaries we need now are those who see precisely how certain technologies are causing harm and who resist them when necessary."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/18/luddites-social-technology-visionaries/

2023-09-17 12:43:25

#Marx #Marxism #Capitalism #BigTech #AI #Automation: "The tech industry is structured for groupthink. It needs a perpetual supply of shiny new paradigms to impel new waves of investment. Generative AI seems to be the latest one. Still, there is more substance to generative AI than to cryptocurrency or the metaverse, which were the most recent candidates for the next new thing. Crypto never managed to become anything more than a casino, and the metaverse barely exists. By contrast, generative AI has all sorts of obvious use cases. It also has a “wow factor” that helps get the blood and capital flowing. ChatGPT, Midjourney, and the like may not signal the imminent arrival of an artificial superintelligence—I have my doubts—but they do demonstrate real technical sophistication of the kind that we didn’t see in, say, NFT apes.
As for what this shift means for worker struggles, it is important to note that generative AI is a labor-intensive technology. The data on which AI systems are trained needs to be sorted and labeled by humans. The outputs also need to be evaluated, especially to prevent AI interfaces from engaging in racist outbursts or other undesirable behavior. Most of the people who do this work are poorly paid; some are starting to organize. In May, a group of more than 150 Nairobi-based workers who helped to create ChatGPT and who maintain Facebook and TikTok voted to form a union. This is the sort of struggle that deserves the close and careful attention of journalists and organizers. AI tends to be presented in popular discourse as quite abstract, but at root it’s profoundly industrial, and the working conditions of the people turning its cranks can be downright Dickensian."
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/09/16/a-marx-for-all-seasons/

2023-09-16 12:33:18

#Cybersecurity #Spyware #Predator #Surveillance: "A new type of mercenary spyware came on the radar called Predator. It’ll infect a mobile phone, and then suck up all the data from it. Contacts, text messages, location, and more. This malware is being sold to intelligence agencies around the world.
In this episode we hear from Crofton Black at Lighthouse Reports who spent 6 months with a team of journalists researching this story which was published here: https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/flight-of-the-predator/.
We also hear from Bill Marczak and John Scott-Railton from Citizen Lab.
If you want to hear about other mercenary spyware, check out episodes 99 and 100, about NSO group and Pegasus. To hear another episode about Greece check out episode 64 called Athens Shadow Games."
https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/137/

2023-09-16 12:11:39

#Cybersecurity #SocialEngineering #Hacking #LasVegas #Cybercrime: "The hackers who are believed to be behind a major cyberattack that has disrupted several casinos and hotels in Las Vegas are part of a small but prolific cybercrime clique whose members have also hit other major U.S. companies in the past year by talking their way into access to computer networks, cybersecurity experts and a person familiar with the hacks said.
They are known in many cybersecurity circles in part because of a rare trait — they appear to be native English speakers, something that differentiates them from the many cybercrime groups that are made up of Russians and Eastern Europeans."
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/mgm-las-vegas-hackers-scattered-spider-rcna105238

2023-09-16 12:10:11

#SocialMedia #Musk #Twitter #Branding #Marketing: "Louis Vuitton, Jimmy Choo and Warner Bros. Entertainment are among the many X users that just can't stop calling the newly renamed platform “Twitter.” The social giant's rebrand, which took place in July after Elon Musk did away with the iconic blue bird logo, is taking some time to catch on.
These brands continue to call X by its former name on their official pages. Even the POTUS account for the president of the United States refers to “tweets” being archived as part of its reminder in its bio that official government communications on the site formerly known as Twitter are recorded in the Library of Congress. This reminder also serves as a recognition of how important the platform has been in the public square, so much so that a president‘s tweets—or “posts”—are saved for posterity.
This branding confusion seems to be commonplace, with a new poll finding that 69% of U.S. X users still refer to the platform as Twitter and to posts as “tweets.” The survey, which included 1,047 U.S. adults over the age of 18, was conducted online in the United States by The Harris Poll and Ad Age Research from Sept. 6 to Sept. 7. Ad Age commissioned the survey to see how well the X rebrand is going and what it means for the future of the company."
https://adage.com/article/digital-marketing-ad-tech-news/twitter-users-dont-want-call-it-x-inside-platforms-marketing-challenge/2516031

2023-09-15 10:26:50

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Both the left and the idea of socialism can only be saved with a large, multisectorial, and non-corporativist union movement.

2023-09-15 10:14:05

#AI #AIProcurement: "On September 14, 2023, EPIC published its first in-depth look into state AI procurement: Outsourced & Automated.
Across the country, state and local governments are experimenting with AI tools that outsource important government decisions to private companies, all without public input or oversight. These systems assign children to schools, inform medical decisions about patients, impact policing decisions about where to patrol and whom to target, and determine who receives public benefits. And they are all developed and operated by private companies like Deloitte, Thomson Reuters, and LexisNexis.
Since 2021, EPIC has been investigating the ways that state agencies procure AI systems. Building on the contracts and records we discovered, this report sheds light on the oft-forgotten world of government AI procurement. It not only highlights the variety of AI systems embedded in state government, but also the major companies behind many of the most common government AI systems."
https://epic.org/outsourced-automated/

2023-09-14 11:17:04

#ConspiracyTheories #Covid19 #ClimateChangeDenial: "You listened to conspiratorial podcasts for research, including Steve Bannon’s. Were you ever worried you’d get lost in those worlds?
I felt that way the first time I went to a climate change denial conference. I was a tiny bit worried I would start to doubt my own understanding of the science by listening to them. But the exact opposite happened, because it was so completely incoherent. One guy says it’s getting cooler. Another says it’s getting hotter—but the sunspots! Another guy says everyone should just get air-conditioning. That’s what it’s like listening to Bannon or any of those “intellectual dark web” types. You can see it right now with RFK Jr. He’s saying Covid was a bioweapon. This is also the guy who told people not to wear masks, not to lock down, not to get vaccinated. So which is it? Occasionally Bannon would have someone on who would claim that people were just dropping dead from the vaccine."
https://www.wired.com/story/covid-conspiracies-ai-doppelgangers-naomi-klein/

2023-09-13 10:34:42

#TechnicalWriting #Cybersecurity #MFA: "Technical writers simplify complex information so that anyone can understand it. The best tech writers partner with project, product, marketing, engineering, and customer support teams to create strategies and content that help customers and internal teams succeed. That’s exactly what Tammy Rahn, content architect at Salesforce, did for the MFA initiative.
In her time at Salesforce, Rahn learned to connect internal silos. No matter the roles, teams, or organizational structures, she used content as a foundation to align stakeholders and drive tasks forward. From the start of the MFA program, she aligned teams around a centralized content strategy – including a blueprint for how to inspire and guide customers to adopt MFA.
Investing in quality technical writers can help your company break down silos. This ensures that employees across departments are able to understand the task — and how to explain the benefits to customers."
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/technical-writer-technology-adoption/

2023-09-12 15:56:38

#Media #MediaPolicy #Journalism #News #PublicService #MarketFailure: "Amid the retreat of local journalism and the resulting emergence of “news deserts,” where communities lack authentic and civically accountable sources of news, it is important to not only seek new revenue streams for news organizations but also to consider how financial resources and institutional structures secure journalistic autonomy and an abiding dedication to public service. Surveying initiatives to bolster local reporting in multiple countries, this study finds that such efforts frequently rest on an unstated optimism that market failures can be corrected and that new, sustainable business models ultimately will solve the journalism crisis. In contrast to these stopgap interventions, initiatives based on public service media principles found in the world's healthiest democracies—such as providing information across all social groups and fostering civic engagement—are better positioned to rebuild local systems in which news media are structured as enduring social institutions with crucial roles to play in democratic processes."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1461670X.2023.2253928

2023-09-09 12:07:43

#Cities #Urbanism #Gentrification #Housing: "The root of the problem is that housing is treated as an instrument of profit, one in which the exchange value is prioritized over its use value. The sole solution is to decouple housing from profit and make it a human right. The profit motive keeps all but the flippers, private equity firms, and management companies, the developers and landlords and the obscenely wealthy—whose economic freedom is unimpeded—in constant, virulent antagonism.
The cost of housing forces those below a certain income level into peripheries where we become the gentrifier—with the power to gamble on the price of land and permanently alter a community’s social capital. Yes, this feels terrible. Yes, many of us, especially if we have the freedom of movement, are complicit in this process in our own ways. The choice is either to live with this sin-like guilt or to be a neighbor who knows their neighbors and their rights, who deftly avoids the selfish pitfalls of NIMBYism while keeping an eye on the real fight: a high-stakes political battle for increasingly scarce stability, for what was once in more idealistic times called “the right to the city.” It’s true, many of us neighbors are transplants. But no one wants to be a transplant forever."
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/gentrification-rhetorical-weapon-systemic-issue/

2023-08-30 10:09:01

#Longtermism #TESCREAL #AGI: "The warnings I articulated in 2019 and 2021 are no longer merely hypothetical. What we’re seeing now is exactly what I worried could happen in the years to come. It didn’t take long for my predictions to prove accurate. When leading TESCREALists argue that existential risks are the “one kind of catastrophe that must be avoided at any cost,” to quote Bostrom with italics added, one shouldn’t be surprised if members of the community start talking about the use of force, military strikes, or targeted killings to reduce the supposed “existential risk” of AGI.
I do not know how this ends, but what’s clear from history is that many utopian movements, embracing a kind of “utilitarian” reasoning, have left a trail of destruction behind them. Will this time be any different? It depends on whether the power and influence of the TESCREAL movement continues to grow, and right now, the trendlines are ominous."
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/before-its-too-late-buddy/

2023-08-25 10:35:59

RT @algorithmwatch
The EU’s new rules to govern #BigTech platforms officially kick in today. But will that really make the internet a safer place? #DSADay
Learn what to expect with our #DigitalServicesAct explainer. 💡
https://algorithmwatch.org/en/dsa-explained/

2023-08-21 10:02:14

"TO HIS MANY fans, Elon Musk is the future. Whether that future means self-driving cars, brain chip implants, an “everything app,” a colonized Mars, or all of the above, they believe in the billionaire’s ambitions — and, crucially, his ability to bring them to fruition.
But why? Musk has an uneven track record as both innovator and entrepreneur. If he maintains a reputation for high-tech triumph, it’s in part because he’s been a relentless self-promoter, announcing new projects at such a clip that headlines can never quite catch up with the failed and abandoned ideas left in his wake. By appearing restless, driven, always in pursuit of the next big thing, he adds to the impression that he’s accomplished plenty already.
Along the way, he’s exaggerated, overpromised, skirted facts, and lied. A lot. There are lies to save face, misrepresentations to gain an advantage, and, perhaps most of all, bluster about when a scientific breakthrough will become a reality. There are also lies about stuff that doesn’t matter. (Like, at all.) Here we present a comprehensive but by no means exhaustive list of Musk’s habitual hucksterism, hyperbole, evasions, and outright fabrications."
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-lists/elon-musk-twitter-zuckerberg-lies-1234808808/hyperloop-1234808813/

2023-08-20 11:31:26

#Crypto #Cryptocurrencies #Scam #Tether #China #Cambodia #SlaveLabor: "I’d been hearing rumors about illicit uses of Tether—I’d seen court documents containing intercepted messages from a Russian money launderer promoting it to his clients, for one thing—but pig butchering was the most concrete example I found. People around the world really were losing huge sums of money to the con. A project finance lawyer in Boston with terminal cancer handed over $2.5 million. A divorced mother of three in St. Louis was defrauded of $5 million. And the victims I spoke to all told me they’d been told to use Tether, the same coin Vicky suggested to me. Rich Sanders, the lead investigator at CipherBlade, a crypto-tracing firm, said that at least $10 billion had been lost to crypto romance scams.
The huge sums involved weren’t the most shocking part. I learned that whoever was posing as Vicky was likely a victim as well—of human trafficking. Most pig-butchering operations were orchestrated by Chinese gangsters based in Cambodia or Myanmar. They’d lure young people from across Southeast Asia to move abroad with the promise of well-paying jobs in customer service or online gambling. Then, when the workers arrived, they’d be held captive and forced into a criminal racket.
Thousands have been tricked this way. Entire office towers are filled with floor after floor of people sending spam messages around the clock, under threat of torture or death. With the assistance of translators, I started video chatting with people who’d escaped."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-08-17/crypto-text-message-scams-lead-back-to-cambodia-slave-labor

2023-08-17 21:18:52

#USA #Privacy #DataProtection: "I don't want to pretend that all privacy questions can be resolved with simple, bright-line rules. It's not clear who "owns" many classes of private data – does your mother own the fact that she gave birth to you, or do you? What if you disagree about such a disclosure – say, if you want to identify your mother as an abusive parent and she objects?
But there are so many stupid-simple privacy questions. Credit bureaux and data-brokers don't inhabit any kind of grey area. They simply should not exist. Getting rid of them is a project of years, but it starts with hacking away at their sources of profits, stripping them of defenses so we can finally annihilate them."
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

2023-08-16 09:51:07

#AI #AIEthics #GenerativeAI #GenerativeAudio: "Overview: This paper analyzes an exhaustive set of 884 papers in the generative audio domain to quantify how generative audio researchers discuss potential negative impacts of their work and catalog the types of impacts being considered. Jarringly, less than 10% of works discuss any potential negative impacts—particularly worrying because the papers that do so raise serious ethical implications and concerns relevant to the broader field, such as the potential for fraud, deep-fakes, and copyright infringement."
https://montrealethics.ai/the-ethical-implications-of-generative-audio-models-a-systematic-literature-review/

2023-08-14 23:42:52

RT @CarissaVeliz
It seems that #Google is trying to design a new #ad ecosystem that will allow it to dominate...again.
#AIEthics.
https://digiday.com/marketing/the-privacy-sandbox-conundrum-ad-tech-vendors-remain-cautious-about-googles-vision/