Vort3x | Cybersalon | November 15, 2021
Vort3x, published on the 15th of each month, aims to pick out significant developments in the intersection of computers, freedom, privacy, and security for friends near and far. The views expressed in these stories do not necessarily reflect those of Cybersalon, either individually or collectively. Prepared by Wendy M. Grossman.
Cybersalon Events
Tales of the Cybersalon #4: Any Spare Change?
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November 30, 2021
Online
The fourth Tales of the Cybersalon workshop focuses on the future of money. A panel of experts including Dave Birch, Jana Hlistova, and Caron – Jane Lyon will discuss four new science fiction short stories to be selected from an open call. Submit stories by November 13.
Cybersalon Christmas Lecture
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December 8, 2021
London, UK
Cybernetics pioneer Raul Espejo, creator of the early 1970s Chilean system Cybersyn and a professor at Lincoln University, will present the annual Cybersalon Christmas lecture, focusing on the question of whether post-pandemic society should optimize – or reboot. The lecture will be followed by a discussion among Espejo, Richard Barbrook (University of Westminster), Eva Pascoe (Cybersalon), and Edward Saperia (Newspeak House).
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NEWS
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Facebook becomes “Meta” and embraces the metaverse
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Facebook has announced it will change the name of its umbrella holding company to “Meta” and pour its resources over the next ten years into building the “Metaverse”, Maggie Tilman reports at Pocket Lint. She goes on to outline Facebook’s plans and place them in context of past fiction and real-world work on virtual worlds, virtual reality, and augmented reality. At Ars Technica, Kyle Orland explores the 20-year history of the concept since science fiction writer Neal Stephenson first coined “metaverse” and asks what problem it solves for users. At The Atlantic, Ethan Zuckerman describes the “terrible” metaverse he built 27 years ago and suggests Facebook will do no better. At Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick predicts that the metaverse is far stranger and quirkier than anything on Facebook and is already happening on Twitch, Discord, and TikTok. At Medium, Clive Thompson writes that the metaverse was already built years ago and is currently serving millions of people every day; it’s Minecraft.
China targets ethnic minorities and dissidents worldwide
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China uses physical attacks, abductions, harassment and intimidation via phone calls and internet messaging in order to control thought and speech outside its borders, Lauren Hilgers reports at the Guardian. Hilgers focuses on the Tibetan diaspora, who are never certain whether they are underestimating or overestimating the threat to themselves and their families of spies that may or may not be among them. A recent Freedom House report finds that China’s foreign influence campaigns target ethnic minorities and dissidents on a global scale beyond that of any other country.
Judge gives WhatsApp leave to appeal against Ireland’s €525 million 2020 fine
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A High Court judge has given WhatsApp Ireland leave to challenge the €225 million fine levied against the company in August 2020 under the General Data Protection Regulation, Aodhan O’Faolain reports at the Irish Times. WhatsApp seeks declarations from the court that some provisions of Ireland’s 2018 data protection act are incompatible with the State’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights
Twitter debuts subscription service Twitter Blue in US and New Zealand
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Twitter has announced it is testing Twitter Blue, a subscription service that gives users the ability to set a 30-second timer in which they can edit tweets, pin conversations to their profiles, upload 10-minute video clips, and read ad-free articles from a host of news sites including the Washington Post, the Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, among others, Queenie Wong reports at CNet. Twitter tested the service in Australia and Canada in June, and is now rolling it out in the US ($3/month) and New Zealand (NZD 4.49/month).
23andMe pivots to developing drugs based on analyzing its database of DNA samples
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The newly-public DNA testing company 23andMe is analyzing the 8.8 million DNA sequences it has collected from customers since its founding in 2007 in order to develop effective drugs against cancer and other diseases, Kristen V. Brown reports at Bloomberg. According to the pitch document CEO Anne Wojcicki used to attract 23andMe’s first funding, developing drugs tailored to specific genetic profiles was always the plan once the company had enough data to work with. Its first compound, an immuno-oncology treatment to harness the body’s immune system against cancer, is in clinical trials, and it has 19 other potential drug candidates in various stages of progress. The company plans to focus on diseases that many people have, lack good treatments, and on which 23andMe has a lot of data.
FEATURES AND ANALYSIS
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In this article at Spacing Toronto, Anna Artyushina and Alina Wernick discuss the smart city initiatives emerging from the EU and US and discuss the possibilities for Canada. Enthusiasm for large-scale smart city projects appears to be waning – the writers cite Alphabet’s decision to end Sidewalk Labs’ Toronto plan – but municipalities seeking sustainability and law enforcement agencies are buying smart technologies including AI, facial recognition, and Internet of Things for the purposes of security and surveillance in public spaces. Good governance can’t be automated; they conclude with suggestions to ensure that sustainability does not become a vector for mass surveillance.
Past technologies offer clues to regulating social media
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In this article at The New Atlantis, Nicholas Carr asks what we can learn from regulating earlier communications technologies – postal mail, telegrams, radio, TV – as we try to work out how to control social media. His key principle is the separation of conversation between individuals (private speech) and broadcasting (public speech). Carr proposes a Digital Communications Act that would apply the public interest standard familiar from TV to online broadcasting while keeping personal communications private,
Conspiracy theory says the internet is dead
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In this article at The Atlantic, Kaitlyn Tiffany explores a conspiracy theory that holds that the entire internet died five years ago and is now fake. “Dead-internet” theory holds that the internet is now populated almost entirely by AI; like other conspiracy theories it is being propagated by a mix of bots, trolls, and a few true believers, and has some of its roots in a truthful media story, New York Magazine’s 2018 feature on the prevalence of bot-powered scams, spams, and spoofs.
Web3 plan for next-generation internet embraces decentralization
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In this article at Slate, Aaron Mak explains “Web3”, an idea for running a next-generation internet on public blockchains in the interests of decentralization. The aspect getting the most attention at the moment is DeFi – decentralized finance, a plan for bypassing banks and governments by conducting financial transactions on the blockchain. Mak notes experiments by Reddit to give contributors ownership of parts of the communities they help create and the Decentralized Autonomous Operation (DAO) betting platform Augur. At Freecode, Nader Dabit provides a more technical explanation. At Fabric Ventures, Max Mersch and Richard Muirhead explain why Web3 matters: it will bring a “borderless and frictionless” native payment layer (upending businesses like Paypal and Square), bring the “token economy” to support new businesses (upending venture capitalists), and tie individual identity to wallets (bypassing authentication services like OAuth, email plus password, and enabling multiple identities). At the Cloudflare blog, Thibault Meunier explains what this means for Cloudflare in practical terms.
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On this page are video clips from the 2021 UK Internet Governance Forum, which included panels on the future of the UK’s data protection framework, currently under review, tackling gender-based violence online, the online safety bill, “greening” the internet, and the future of the internet. In the latter panel, speakers expressed concerns about centralisation, conflicting legal requirements, and the cost and technical impact of new ideas for changing internet architecture.
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DIARY
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In light of the coronavirus outbreak, please check links to events listed below for participation restrictions and updates as to whether events will go ahead.
ONE-OFF EVENTS
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November 16-18, 2021
Hybrid from Barcelona, Spain
At this year’s Smart City Expo World Congress, City Possible looks forward to showcasing how city leaders, private sector companies and many others are coming together to combine strengths and find solutions to enable innovation, accelerate digital access and foster an inclusive economic recovery. In a unique partnership, we will connect the insight and expertise of the City Possible network and Mastercard technology to the reach of SCEWC in our drive to build more innovative and inclusive cities.
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November 17-18, 2021
Hybrid from Brussels, Belgium
This pivotal year for Europe’s recovery has brought many challenges as well as new perspectives and opportunities for transformation, which have made coming together to debate and discuss Europe’s pressing issues more important than ever. This year, the European Business Summit will highlight Europe’s ongoing digital and sustainable shifts and its renewed cooperation with longstanding partners and neighbours – three major axes critical for the global recovery.
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November 18, 2021
Online from London, UK
Consult Hyperion is partnering with Trust Elevate to produce a three-part series exploring the digital rights of children and young people. The series will walk through some of the challenges faced by children, their parents and educators. What role can industry take? How can we ensure products and services are designed with children and young people in mind? And what is our Digital Responsibility? The first webinar will present Rachel O’Connell, founder of Trust Elevate and an authority on age verification,, in conversation with Consult Hyperion global ambassador Dave Birch. The later webinars in the series will be on December 2 and January 13.
Edge Computing, 6G and Satellite Communications
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December 1, 2021
Online from Brussels, Belgium
The EU Panel for the Future of Science and Technology’s annual lecture will investigate the challenges associated with having 80% of data being generated and processed at the edge and only 20% in the cloud. In the distributed environment that will come together with the massive deployment of new applications, such as autonomous driving, an excessive response time or a faulty connection can literally become a matter of life or death.
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December 6-10, 2021
Katowice, Poland
The Internet Governance Forum is an international meeting, held at the initiative of the United Nations, that enables a global discussion on the development of the Internet. It is a place for exchanging thoughts and experiences in the field of Internet governance.
Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection
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January 26-28, 2022
Brussels, Belgium
CPDP offers the cutting edge in legal, regulatory, academic and technological development in privacy and data protection. Within an atmosphere of independence and mutual respect, CPDP gathers academics, lawyers, practitioners, policy-makers, industry and civil society from all over the world in Brussels, offering them an arena to exchange ideas and discuss the latest emerging issues and trends. This unique multidisciplinary formula has served to make CPDP one of the leading data protection and privacy conferences in Europe and around the world. The theme of the 2022 conference is “data protection and privacy in transitional times”.
ONGOING
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London’s Ada Lovelace Institute, founded in 2019 to ensure the ethical use of AI, is running a series of events on the issues surrounding the use of technologies in response to the pandemic. Late-2020 events included discussions of regulating for algorithm accountability and “almost-future” AI.
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Recent webinars sponsored by Bace Security include a “fireside” discussion with prominent women in security, security problems in online voting, methods for privacy-protecting digital contact tracing, advanced botnet researcher, and using marketing techniques to improve cybersecurity communication.
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The Benchmark Initiative is running regular events on topics such as the use of location data to end the global sanitation crisis, the safe use of location data in human migration; data, power, and the pandemic; and managing social distancing in public spaces. All events are posted on Vimeo soon after they conclude.
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The Communication and Media Institute (CAMRI) at London’s University of Westminster hosts a series of online events presenting the work of sociologists, historians, economists, and activists studying online developments around the world. Spring 2021 offerings include a reassessment of the 2010 Arab Spring and studies of internal communication connections within the Global South, the changing role of public service media, decolonizing the curriculum, and using Facebook to reduce polarization.
Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs
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The Carnegie Council runs frequent events on topics such as illiberal threats to democracy, the societal limits of AI ethics, AI and ethics in Africa, and inclusion. The Council posts audio and a transcript after each event.
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Ongoing series of events on topics such as new legislation, using data to combat counterfeit goods, and trends in online advertising.
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Data & Society has moved its weekly Databites and Network Power Hours programs into online interactive formats. Its first event for 2021 examines digital technology and democratic theory.
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The Research Group on Data, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Law & Society is presenting a series of discussions on topics such as robotics (Frank Pasquale, April 1), rights, technology, and society (Anne-Sophie Hulin, May 19), and justifiability and contestability of algorithmic decision systems (Daniel Le Métayer, June 1).
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EFF and its local counterparts in the Electronic Frontier Alliance are running numerous events on subjects such as technology education, open source, voting security, and content moderation.
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Frequent events on topics such as cybersecurity, digital tax, online content moderation, and upcoming EU legislation.
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Future in Review is running a series of online “FiReSide” events. Recent topics include Chinese-US relations after the presidential election, and the future technology struggle.
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The Geneva Internet Platform (GIP), a Swiss initiative run by DiploFoundation is organizing monthly briefings on internet governance, providing updates and news and projections of how they will influence future developments.
Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford
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HAI’s series of events covers AI-related topics such as upcoming regulation, issues with algorithms, health, and AI and society.
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Kate Klonick, an assistant professor at St John’s University School of Law who specializes in online speech and governance, and Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and co-founder and chief editor of Lawfare, hold a nightly discussion of current affairs, law, politics, and digital media with invited guests. Daily at 5pm Eastern Time.
Legal Frontiers in Digital Media 2020
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The Berkeley Center for Law and Technology’s online seminars on emerging legal issues at the intersection of digital media, freedom of speech, and law include AI, privacy law, technology law as a vehicle for anti-racism, and a look ahead to the next telecommunications act.
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The London Futurists group, led by former Psion and Symbian architect David Wood, is presenting near-weekly speaker-led events focusing on potential radical transformations of humanity and society. Upcoming topics include anticipating future pandemics and a discussion of Michael Baxter’s new book, Living in the Age of the Jerk. Event recordings are made available soon after meetings conclude.
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The ODI’s Friday lunchtime (London time) talks have moved online. These one-hour talks cover topics such as data ethics, social equity, trust, and converting weather into music.
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The Open Rights Group and its local offshoots are running frequent online presentations and discussions of digital privacy, democracy, and data exploitation. Recent topics have included the launch of ORG’s data and democracy report, a proposed law to ensure that contact-tracing apps are surrounded with privacy-protecting safeguards, and the effect of the pandemic on democratic institutions.
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Public Knowledge is running public web events on subjects such as algorithmic amplification of hate speech, the survival of local journalism, and how to protect privacy during a pandemic.
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London’s Royal United Services Institute is running frequent online events considering topics relating to international politics, terrorism, financial crime, policing, and warfare, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic and the changes it will bring.
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Singularity University’s upcoming events include reimagining primary education and a series of executive programs aimed at various countries.
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