Vort3x | Cybersalon | March , 2022
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.
Contents: Cybersalon events | News | Features | Diary | Jobs
Cybersalon Events
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NFTs, DeepFakes, and Creator Authentication
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March 15, 2022
Newspeak House, 7pm, London
Panel discussion with NFT creators/blockchain start ups
Tickets income will be donated for Ukraine refugees support via @Techfugees
NEWS
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Russia Criminalizes “False News” about the War
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Numerous Western media organizations have suspended operations in Russia in order to protect their staff after the Duma passed a law that criminalizes “discrediting the Russian military”, Tiffany Hau reports at the New York Times. The law, which allows for prison sentences of up to 15 years, has also laid almost all independent or opposition domestic media organizations to shut down. The BBC will use shortwave radio to broadcast news in English in Kyiv and parts of Russia, which is also blocking foreign news sites, Facebook, and Twitter. At Euractiv, Molly Killeen reports that the EU has banned the dissemination and broadcast of RT and Sputnik content within the EU. Years of effort that have laid the groundwork for Russian disinformation about Ukraine. At MIT Technology Review, Chris Stokel-Walker reports that activists are using ads, web scripts, and fake reviews to seed factual information into Russia. In an episode of Michael Cohen’s “Mea Culpa” podcast, Nandini Jammi, founder of the Check My Ads Institute, explains how Russia seeds misinformation across the world via the internet.
US President Joe Biden Orders Plan for Cryptocurrency Regulation
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On March 9 US president Joe Biden signed an executive order directing federal agencies to formulate a coordinated approach to regulating cryptocurrencies, Nikhilesh De reports at Coindesk. First mooted in October 2021, the order leaves it open for the agencies, which span consumer protection, financial stability, abuse, inclusion, innovation, and global leadership, to determine appropriate positions to take, but sets out six key priorities and directs the Treasury Department to develop policy recommendations for the future of money. About 16% of the US population is thought to be invested in or trading cryptocurrencies.
Platform Wars – Disney Builds Unified Advertising to Compete
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Disney plans to tie together the data it collects on users of its media properties, connected TVs, device IDs to unify its ad sales and compete with Google, Meta, and Amazon, Tim Peterson reports at Digiday. Many of the building blocks were developed at the streaming service Hulu, which became wholly Disney-owned in 2019. Disney believes it will be able to offer advertisers new options for targeted advertising at scale, as does competitor NBC.
Online Transcription Services Place Data at Risk
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Otter.ai and other popular transcription services frequently used by journalists, may put sensitive text and audio data – and their sources – at risk with inadequate privacy and security protections, Phelim Kine reports at Politico. While all these services claim at least partial compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation, they share their data with myriad third parties and note in their privacy policies that they will respond to law enforcement data requests. Journalists in particular should conduct risk assessments about the potential threat to sources in precarious situations.
Indian Journal Publishers Sue Sci-Hub for Copyright Violations
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Four journal publishers in India – Elsevier, Wiley India, Wiley Periodicals, and the American Chemical Society – have brought a legal case against Sci-Hub, a Russia-based site that bypasses paywalls to make journal articles available for free, Meaghann Tobin reports at Rest of World. Indian scientists say permanently blocking Sci-Hub would have a catastrophic effect on research in India, making the site’s survival a matter of social fairness. The provisions on fair dealings in India’s copyright law could work in Sci-Hub’s favor.
Splinternet – who will Build their own Nationwide Intranet
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Runet, a national intranet that can be disconnected from the rest of the internet is being developed in Russia, though the country lags well behind China, which began to build its version 25 years ago. Russia, which depends on externally sourced technology, is unlikely to be able to create as complete a system as China, which owns all its own stack, The Economist reports. At Euractiv, Luca Bertuzzi reports that China and Russia planned to present a proposal to the World Telecommunication Standardisation Assembly of the International Telecommunications Union that would redesign internet protocols to give nation-states greater ability to control the network within their borders.
FEATURES AND ANALYSIS
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Digital Transnational Repression
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In a new report, Canada’s Citizen Lab studies the effect of transnational repression – its term for using technological means to silence or coerce nationals located outside their borders – on Canadian activists and dissidents living in exile in Canada. Victims of international targeting have little support, and the Canadian government fails to include digital transnational repression within its definition of “foreign interference”, which it is beginning to address. In a video clip, Citizen Lab explains how digital transnational repression works.
TikTok Grapples with War Footage
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In this article for Wired, Chris Stokel-Walker, author of TikTok Boom, studies the war footage appearing on TikTok, which didn’t exist in earlier wars. TikTok’s immediacy and reach, coupled with its youthful and less media-literate audience, mean that misinformation is rife on the platform, while bad actors game the system to block valuable documentation of the war. TikTok is trying to combat misinformation by partnering with independent fact-checking organizations.
Spotify Acquisitions May End Podcast Independence
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In this article at the Guardian, Alex Hern argues that Spotify’s purchase of Joe Rogan’s podcast and archive, along with two more recent acquisitions, the small technology companies Chartable and Podsights, is in service to its goal to become the YouTube of podcasts. When users listen to music, Spotify loses money in royalty payments; when they listen to podcasts, Spotify makes money from advertising. The result may be the beginning of the end for one of the last internet sectors that is not dominated by platforms.
How Wikipedia Became the Arbiter of Truth
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In this article at Prospect, Ethan Zuckerman reviews Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age by South African media scholar Heather Ford. What began as an unreliable collection of articles written by amateurs has grown into a “core part of our collective knowledge infrastructure”. In telling the story, Ford focuses on the evolution of a single article about Egypt’s 2011 Tahrir Square protests.
Security Experts Warn War Will Escalate Cyberattacks
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In this article at Nikkei Asia, internet pioneer Dave Farber and journalist Dan Gillmor warn that Western defenses against cyberattacks are inadequate and the potential for escalation as the Russian invasion of Ukraine progresses. The risks of escalation are alarming and could include crashed or destroyed infrastructure, casualties, and deaths. Even if the Russian invasion does not lead to such problems, another future conflict could. We need to be prepared. At Wired, Matt Burgess discusses the prospects for Ukraine’s unprecedented volunteer “IT Army”, which insiders describe as a way for Ukraine to hit back against Russian ccyberattacks. At the New York Times, Glenn S. Gersfell worries about America’s inadequate and fragmented cyberdefense systems and outlines the change of approach that’s needed.
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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March 19-20, 2022
Online from Boston, MA, USA
LibrePlanet is the annual conference hosted by the Free Software Foundation. It provides an opportunity for community activists, domain experts, and people seeking their own solutions to come together in order to discuss current issues in technology and ethics. The 2022 theme is “Living Liberation”.
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March 23, 2022
London, UK
Hosted by the Internet Service Providers Association, Parliament & Internet is an annual conference to discuss Internet policy and inform policymakers by bringing together government, parliamentarians, officials, business, and civil society tp debate the technology issues that shape legislative policy in an open forum.
Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection
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May 23-25, 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”.
Privacy Law Scholars Conference
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June 2-3, 2022
Boston, MA, USA
PLSC is the oldest and largest gathering of privacy scholars, researchers, and practitioners in the world. Run as a paper workshop, PLSC incubates and critiques scholarship at the vanguard of the field of law and technology.
RightsCon
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June 6-10, 2022
Online
Hosted by Access Now, RightsCon is the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age, drawing thousands of activists, academics, and policy makers. The 11th RightsCon will be a platform where stakeholders across regions and sectors can come together to address the most pressing human rights and technology issues.
Workshop on the Economics of Information Security
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June 21-22, 2022
Tulsa, OK, USA
The Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS) is the leading forum for interdisciplinary scholarship on information security and privacy, combining expertise from the fields of economics, social science, business, law, policy, and computer science. Prior workshops have explored the role of incentives between attackers and defenders of information systems, identified market failures surrounding internet security, quantified risks of personal data disclosure, and assessed investments in cyber-defense. The 2022 workshop will build on past efforts using empirical and analytic tools not only to understand threats, but also to strengthen security and privacy through novel evaluations of available solutions.
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June 21-24, 2022
Seoul, South Korea and online
The fifth annual ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (formerly FAT*) brings together researchers and practitioners interested in fairness, accountability, and transparency in socio-technical systems. The online version of the conference – including both live-streamed elements of the in-person conference, and online-only content – will also begin on June 21, with content and discussion available for two weeks from that date, and a library of content available subsequently.
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July 22-24, 2022
New York, NY, USA
Four years after the last edition of the New York-based hacker conference, A New HOPE promises to be transformational for the hacker community and the first in its new venue at Brooklyn’s St. John’s University.
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August, 2022 (TBC)
Online
The seventeenth Wikimedia conference will be a virtual event organized by a diverse group of global volunteers with distributed in-person events if local and global circumstances allow.
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August 11-14, 2022
Las Vegas, NV, USA
The largest hacking conference presents its 30th edition.
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.
JOBS – CYBERSECURITY/IT
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Sponsored by JobAt.BE
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Seconded National Expert for ENISA
Senior Software Engineer – Dimension,
Based: Brussels, partly remote
Project Manager – Nomad Digital
Based: Paris or Brussels, 50% travel/remote
