Vort3x | Cybersalon | May 15, 2024
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
Cybersalon Events
Wednesday May 29, 7pm to 11 PM
Join us at Newspeak House, East London
Meet-Up on Lessons Learned from UK Local Elections 2024 with “Democracy Classroom”, “Small Axe” and Election Tech Handbook 2024
Free but please sign up here as places limited
New Book
How are we going to buy stuff in Metaverse? How can we avoid walled gardens in Metaverse?
These and more questions are tackled in a new, exciting book by David Birch and Victoria Richardson
With introduction by Eva Pascoe, sharing her experiences of trading in VR Café Cyberia
NEWS
US Bans Tiktok on Grounds of National Security
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The US Congress has passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which bans TikTok unless its parent company, ByteDance, divests the video sharing service within 270 days, Lauren Feiner reports at The Verge. President Joe Biden has since signed it into law. The provision is part of a larger national security bill providing foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel. At NBC News, Angela Yang and Savannah Sellers report that TikTok has sued the US government to block enforcement of the new law on the grounds that the national security considerations are insufficient to justify restricting Americans’ constitutional right to free speech.
WhatsApp Tells Indian Court Compliance with Law Is Impossible
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WhatsApp has told the Delhi High Court that if it upholds India’s 2021 law requiring that messaging services maintain traceability for all messages, it will be forced to exit the country as compliance with the law is technically impossible and would require it to break end-to-end encryption. More than half a billion people in India, including small businesses, service jobs, and even doctors all rely on WhatsApp, which is a substantial part of India’s digital infrastructure. Digital rights activists warn that if governing party BJP does well in the upcoming elections, it may bring in even stronger traceability requirements in the Digital India bill.
Stack Overflow Bars User Protests to Protect OpenAI Deal
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Stack Overflow moderators are barring users from protesting the site’s deal giving OpenAI full access to its API as a source of training data, Dallin Grimm reports at Tom’s Hardware. Screenshots show that moderators have reverted posts that have been deleted or changed and suspended the users. Moderators have said that Stack Overflow messages become “part of the collective efforts”; the site’s terms and conditions say that users cannot revoke permission for the site to use their contributions once made.
Oxford University Closes Future of Humanity Institute
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Oxford University has closed down the 19-year-old Future of Humanity Institute led by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, who has called the move “death by bureaucracy”, Nick Robins-Early reports at the Guardian. The Institute was dedicated to Silicon Valley favorite ideas such as the Singularity, long-termism, and effective altruism. At Wired, Will Knight interviews Bostrom about his new book, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, which imagines a future in which humanity has developed superintelligent machines that have solved climate change and disease, but kept them from destroying humanity the way he suggested in his previous book, Superintelligence.
US Government Continues Investigating Tesla
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The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that its three-year study of Tesla’s Autopilot system found 13 crashes involving one or more deaths, and many more involving serious injuries, the Guardian reports. NHTSA is opening a second investigation to determine whether the December 2023 recall (an over-the-air software update) of 2.03 million cars fulfills Tesla’s promise that it will better ensure drivers pay attention when Autopilot is enabled. At Ars Technica, Jonathan M. Gitlin reports that both the US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating whether Tesla committed securities or wire fraud by misleading investors about Autopilot’s capabilities. At Futurism, Victor Tangermann reports that the NHTSA’s second investigation reports that the crashes have continued despite the software patch.
FEATURES & ANALYSIS
Realism and the EU’s Digital Markets Act
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In this article at Tech Policy, Cristina Caffarra offers a realistic view of what the EU’s new Digital Markets Act can achieve. Less optimistic than many, she believes that enforcement will be more difficult than proponents suggested, and says that regulators need to gain a deeper understanding of technology and business models in order to work our which rules really matter. Finally, she suggests that academics writing law and economics papers also need to study business models because too often they assume defendants are always right.
Growth at All Costs Consumes the User-Generated Web
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In this posting at Where’s Your Ed At?, Ed Zitron asks if the web is dying, using the Reddit IPO, which netted payouts for shareholders while offering nothing to the users who built the system, as Exhibit A of the destruction of the user-generated Internet. In a second posting, Zitron writes that the big technology companies are “looting the Internet” by drowning everything in advertising and no longer bothering to offer value to their users in return. Zitron calls this mindset of growth at all costs the “rot economy”. At his blog, Bruce Schneier predicts that large language models and AI-generated content summaries like those Google proposes to incorporate into its search engine will destroy publishing for humans by treating all content as digestible raw material.
Rewilding the Internet
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In this essay at Noema, Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon use ecology as a metaphor for the work that needs to be done to “rewild” the Internet – that is, restore it to an open, more resilient, and more diverse state, reversing today’s pervasive extraction. While decades of development can’t be undone, we can build on the open technologies we have, such as RSS feeds, email newsletters, blogs, and federated social media systems. At Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow builds on Farrell’s and Berjon’s essay to advocate for a return to the original concept of web browsers as “faithful user agents” that serve their users instead of their owners. At Scientific American, Helen Jay argues that public service broadcasting can serve as a guide to creating tools that promote civic goals rather than commercial ones. Finally, at Citation Needed, Molly White reminds that the old web and its tools that support personal experimentation is still out there if we would just choose to use it.
Generative AI Uses Distinctive Vocabulary
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In this article at Medium, Fareed Khan provides a list of 100 English words such as “delve” that occur disproportionately often in AI-generated text, as well as an app that checks text for those words. At the Guardian, Alex Hern finds a possible explanation: “delve”, among other words, is more frequently used in Africa, where much of the training of AI models takes place.
Pregnancy and Privacy
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In this article at the New Yorker, Jia Tolentino tries to hide her second pregnancy from her phone. The experiment leads her to consider the broader issues around privacy, surveillance, and the inner workings of the online advertising ecosystem as reproductive rights continue to shrink in the US.
DIARY
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April 16-18, 2024
Gladstone, Australia
Everything Open is a conference focused on open technologies, including Linux, open source software, open hardware and open data, and the communities that surround them. The conference provides technical deep-dives as well as updates from industry leaders and experts on a wide array of topics from these areas. Everything Open embodies Linux Australia’s values, providing a space for the community to come together to learn from each other and participate in discussions.
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May 4-5, 2024
Boston, Massachusetts, USA and online
LibrePlanet provides an opportunity for activists, hackers, law professionals, artists, educators, students, developers, policymakers, tinkerers, and anyone looking for technology that respects the users freedom to come together in order to discuss current issues in technology and ethics. For 2024, the theme will be “Cultivating Community”.
Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection
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May 22-24, 2024
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.
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May 30-31, 2024
Washington, DC, USA
PLSC is a paper workshop conference whose goal is to provide support for in-progress scholarship related to information privacy law. It assembles a wide array of privacy law scholars, policymakers, and practitioners who engage in scholarship. Scholars from non-law disciplines – including but not limited to surveillance studies, technology studies, feminist and queer studies, information studies, critical race studies, social sciences, humanities, and computer science – are critical participants.
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June 3-6, 2024
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and online
The seventh annual ACM FAccT conference will bring together researchers and practitioners interested in fairness, accountability, and transparency in socio-technical systems.
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June 12-13, 2024
London, UK and online
TICTeC stands for The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, and is both an annual conference and a programme of year-round activities through mySociety’s TICTeC Communities and TICTeC Labs projects. The conference brings together those from across the world who build, research, use, and fund civic technology to share research, knowledge, and experiences openly and honestly about its impacts and how to improve them in order to strengthen democracy, public participation, transparency, and accountability across the world.
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June 17-19, 2024
Vilnius, Lithuania
The European Dialogue on Internet Governance (EuroDIG) is an open multi-stakeholder platform to exchange views about the Internet and how it is governed. First organised in 2008 by several organisations, government representatives, and experts, it fosters dialogue and collaboration with the Internet community on public policy for the Internet, culminating in an annual conference that takes place in a different European city every year. EuroDIG ‘Messages’ are prepared and presented to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF).
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July 11-13, 2024
Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Since 2006, Netroots Nation has hosted the largest annual conference for progressives, drawing up to 4,000 attendees from around the country and beyond. The annual event brings together diverse voices from around the country and beyond.
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July 12-14, 2024
New York, NY, USA
The 15th HOPE will feature three days and nights of talks, keynotes, and workshops on topics from lockpicking to getting a ham radio license to analyzing Android malware. In the past, HOPE has showcased new movies, had cool live performances, done live radio broadcasts, and much more.
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August 7-10, 2024
Katowice, Poland
Wikimania is the annual conference celebrating all the free knowledge projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation with days of conferences, discussions, meetups, training, and workshops. Hundreds of volunteers and Free Knowledge leaders from around the world gather to discuss issues, report on new projects and approaches, and exchange ideas.
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August 8-11, 2024
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
Def Con is the world’s largest hacker conference.
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September 6-8, 2024
Nairobi, Kenya and online
State of the Map 2024 will bring together passionate mappers, data enthusiasts, technologists, and community members from all corners of the globe to celebrate the spirit of collaboration and open mapping. Building on the valuable lessons and experiences from the previous events, SotM is committed to making this edition even more accessible to everyone who wishes to partake in this grand celebration of open mapping, sharing passionate voices with the entire community.
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December 15-19, 2024 and online
Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
The 19th IGF, “Building Our Multistakeholder Digital Future”, will focus on four main themes: harnessing innovation and balancing risks in the digital space; enhancing the digital contribution to peace, development, and sustainability; advancing human rights and inclusion in the digital age; and improving digital governance for the Internet We Want.
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February 4-5, 2025
London, UK
The third annual State of Open Con will focus on Open Technology including open source software, open hardware, open data, open innovation, open standards, and the value that the open community brings to the UK and its digital economy. Alongside a diverse range of topics, the event promises to include a diverse range of speakers and participants.
