Vort3x | Cybersalon | June 15, 2025
Cybersalon Events
“The Future of Money” – 3rd in our series of events on dollar, euro and stable coins currencies battling for supremacy in the era of Tariffs, rising Bricks and Crypto Revival
With Iza Kaminska (Politico), David Birch (author of “Money in Metaverse”) and James Meadway (Microdose Podcast) – our host John McDonnell MP (Labour), chaired by Dr Richard Barbrook
email [email protected] for Cybersalon Guest List
Wikimania – Aug 6-9 in Kenya
Annual gathering of Wiki editors and tech leaders to discuss the future of Free Knowledge programs. Partial Travel support Grants available
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2025
NEW BOOKS
Post USA dominance, we are entering a multipolar world. New book by historian John Man is a must read to understand when the next conflict will erupt in China influence zone. Key points from John and Eva from RSA fireside chat here
NEWS
Generative AI Faces Model Collapse
———————————————————————-
Wikipedia made a decision to disallow using Gen AI for creating Wiki articles – too many plausible but false statements were observed. Generative AI is also poisoning search with information from poor-quality sources, even for hard information such as financial and business data, a condition known to scientists as “model collapse”, Steve J. Vaughan-Nichols reports at The Register. In model collapse, AI systems degrade because their errors compound as they are increasingly trained on their own output. At the New York Times, Steve Lohr reports that the Mayo Clinic, whose radiology workforce has grown 55% in the last decade, finds that while the 250 AI tools the Clinic has developed are helpful, they can’t replace human radiologists.
Instead, the Clinic’s humans use the AI tools for specific tasks, such as measuring tumor volume, cleaning images, and scanning for blood clots in heart or lungs. In 2016, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton advised medical schools to stop training radiologists because they would soon be surpassed by AI. Now, the American College of Radiology is predicting steady growth in demand for human radiologists through 2055. At Tech Policy Press, Eryk Salvaggio asks why policy makers appear to believe industry hype that artificial general intelligence is imminent when a recent survey of 475 researchers by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence found that 76% doubt current machine learning paradigms will lead to AGI.
Finally, a group of researchers at Apple have released a paper called “The Illusion of Thinking”, which predicts that Large Reasoning Models face “a complete accuracy collapse” as the tasks we assign to them become more complex.
UK Gov to give DWP Powers to Inspect your Bank Accounts if you are Benefit Recipients
———————————————————————-
The Public Authorities (Fraud, Error, and Recovery) Bill, now making its way through the UK’s House of Lords, would give the Department for Work and Pensions unprecedented investigatory powers to routinely and covertly check benefit claimants’ bank accounts, the right of entry to people’s homes, and to seize driver’s licenses or money from bank accounts without having to meet the threshold of “reasonable grounds” to suspect fraud, Anna Dent reports at Computer Weekly. The new powers would apply to recipients of Universal Credit, Employment and Support Allowance, and State Pension Credit, and would introduce an “Eligibility Verification Measure” which would allow DWP to scan millions of bank accounts for not-yet-specified indicators of benefit fraud and error. The Public Law Project and Big Brother Watch have called the powers “disproportionate” and a breach of human rights. The DWP’s impact statement estimates that the use of these powers over ten years will claw back 2% of fraud and error.
Comment: This bill is just one of a group of legislation that will occupy the attention of digital rights activists in the coming months. Also in the pipeline are bill on Data (Use and Access) bill, Cyber Security and Resilience, Data Protection and Digital Information, and AI, plus the early implementation of the now-passed Online Safety Act. Other legislation that, like this bill, appears unrelated will likely also have technological aspects. Plus, there are proposals for a digital identity that sounds like an updated version of the failed 2006-2010 efforts to bring in ID cards. Lots to worry about with respect to digital rights and privacy.
Which country is brave enough to drop Microsoft ?
———————————————————————-
Denmark’s digitization minister is beginning a program to lessen the country’s dependence on Microsoft, Ritzau Politics reports. As a trial, half the ministry’s employees will switch to Libre Office, which will become the standard throughout the office if all goes well. The trial is part of a digitization strategy agreed by the state, regions, and municipalities that aims to build technological sovereignty and cut ties with US companies. In the UK, a group of technologists, activists, and academics have written an open letter to Keir Starmer calling for an independent approach to UK technology and AI policy.
Irish Council for Civil Liberties Brings Collective Action Suit Against Microsoft
————————————————————————————————–
The Irish High Court has ruled that a representative action brought by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties’ Enforce unit on behalf of all people in Ireland against Microsoft over its real-time bidding advertising system may proceed, Fiachra Gallegher reports at the Irish Times. ICCL claims that Microsoft products including Xbox, Windows, web-based Office, the Edge web browser, and webs and apps that use Microsoft’s Xandr adtech broadcast user data into the RTB system, violating the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. The case is thought to be the first of its kind.
UK Police Chiefs Advise Searching Devices After Sudden Pregnancy Loss
————————————————————————————————–
In January, the National Police Chiefs’ Council quietly issued new and expanded guidance on investigating women who have experienced a sudden pregnancy loss when they suspect the miscarriage, early labor, or stillbirth is the result of an illegal abortion, India Block reports at The Standard. Police may seize digital devices to check their search history and period or fertility tracking apps, and search homes for evidence of abortion drugs. At 404 Media, Joseph Cox reports that in Texas law enforcement searched the nationwide database of captured license plate numbers compiled by Flock to look for a women they said had self-administered an abortion.
Comment: Many inside the UK, and most outside it, don’t realise that outside of the exceptions codified in the 1969 abortion law – permitted until 24 weeks and in case of risk to the mother’s life or severe disability for the child – abortion remains a criminal offense in the UK. Prosecutions following pregnancy loss have been rising in recent years, and there are currently two proposals in front of Parliament to decriminalise it.
FEATURES & ANALYSIS
Jay Graeber Plans for Bluesky’s Future
———————————————————————-
In this article at Wired, Kate Knibbs considers the future of Bluesky and interviews CEO Jay Graber. Bluesky has reached 34.6 million users, has recently rolled out verification, and is working on ways to build communities within its app. Graber goes on to discuss the advantages of building a protocol rather than a platform, how the service plans to make money, how the site will manage governance and the ecosystem of third-party apps such as Skylight, which hosts video clips. Knibbs notes that a lot of Graeber’s ideas are similar to earlier ideas for reinventing the web to decentralize and open it back up.
Middle East Embraces All-in-one Superapps
————————————————————–
In this article at Rest of World, Divsha Bhat explores the race to develop WeChat-style superapps in Middle Eastern companies such as Saudi Arabia and UAE. Among the contenders are Dubai-based Careem, UAE-based Le Concierge, Saudi-based Tawakkalna 2.0, and others such as Talabat, Botim, and Noon. Covid-19 is partly to blame for the trend, as companies either expanded their offerings from food delivery or looked for opportunities to expand their range to compensate for the crash in ride-hailing. Le Concierge targets wealthier IAE residents, offering them convenient access to chauffeur-driven cars and on-demand personal shopping. None has so far achieved the dominance of WeChat in China.
AI Changes Software Developers’ Work
——————————————————————–
In this article at the New York Times, Noam Scheiber examines the changes AI is bringing to software developers at Amazon, who say their jobs are becoming less thoughtful, more routine, and much faster paced as the company becomes less forgiving about its newly tightened deadlines. In a two-part series at Techdirt, Mike Masnick recounts his experience using generative AI to build and improve his own task manager at very low cost with no coding skills, and finds it vastly better suited to his needs than the mass-market tools he finds so frustrating.
Comment: As in many other cases – for example, pilots, truck drivers, and journalism – the typical human job involves far more activities than the single task AI is typically optimized for. In 2021, Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender, Margaret Mitchell, and Angelina McMillan-Major warned that small, carefully curated language models would be a more productive and less extractive approach than the large language models currently collapsing.
Cory Doctorow Asks, “Who Broke the Internet?”
——————————————————————–
In this four-part podcast series at the CBC, “Who Broke the Internet?”, and accompanying blog postings, Cory Doctorow expands upon the “enshittification” that he identifies across the Internet, tracing the technological and legal underpinnings of the downward spiral from the 1980s reinterpretation of antitrust law and 1990s technological optimism to today’s frustrations. He concludes with a plan to fix it.
EFF Examines Age Verification in the EU
———————————————————————-
In a series of three blog postings at EFF, Svea Windwehr and Alexis Hancock examine age verification in the EU. In the first, they cover the political background and explore the digital identities proposed by the European Commission. In the second, they examine the published specifications for the age verification app. In the third, they explore alternatives for keeping users safe that do not require age checks, such as offering users better controls and banning behavioral advertising..
Comment: Age verification is also a requirement for services covered by the UK’s Online Safety Act. It is still not clear what, if any, mechanisms are acceptable to the relevant regulator, Ofcom.
DIARY
—————————————-
June 19-21, 2025
Boston, MA, USA
State of the Map US is the largest gathering of OpenStreetMap community members from across the country. In 2025 we will spotlight the successes and challenges of mobility mapping with the theme “Charting the Course”. The event will connect mappers, businesses, academics, government agencies, and nonprofits, who all collaborate around the free and editable map of the world.
Workshop on the Economics of Infosecurity
—————————————-
June 24-25, 2025
Tokyo, Japan
For more than 20 years, WEIS has been 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.
—————————————-
Lillestrom, Norway
The IGF is a global multistakeholder platform that facilitates the discussion of public policy issues pertaining to the Internet. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the World Summit for the Information Society.
—————————————-
July 8-11, 2025
Geneva, Switzerland
Organized by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in partnership with 40 UN sister agencies and co-convened with the government of Switzerland, the AI for Good Global Summit is the leading UN event on AI. It brings together top names in AI with a high-level lineup of global decision makers. Our goal is to identify practical applications of AI, accelerate progress towards the UN SDGs and scale solutions for global impact.
—————————————-
July 21-23, 2025
San Francisco, CA, USA
TrustCon is the global conference dedicated to trust and safety professionals who are responsible for the challenging work of keeping our platforms and communities safe. This conference will create an enduring and supportive community; offer workshops and presentations focused on the practice of trust and safety; and explore successes, lessons learned, and the future of the field. Attendees have the opportunity to collaborate, hear from trust and safety thought leaders, and connect with peers from all over the world.
—————————————-
July 31-August 3, 2025
Portland, OR, USA
Software Freedom Conservancy hosts Free and Open Source Software Yearly to focus on the creation and impact of free and open source software. The event includes community-led tracks with talks and workshops over four days. Previous topics have included community building, education, development and legal and licensing issues. We will use free software to run our conference and reduce the amount of proprietary software that is treated as default.
—————————————-
August 7-9, 2025
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Since 2006, Netroots Nation has hosted the largest annual conference for progressives, drawing thousands of attendees from around the country and beyond.
—————————————-
August 06-09, 2025
Nairobi, Kenya, and online
Wikimania is the annual celebration of all the free knowledge projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation with four 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.
—————————————-
August 7-10, 2025
Las Vegas, Nevada, US
Def Con is one of the world’s largest hacker conventions.
—————————————-
August 15-17, 2025
New York, NY, USA
HOPE 16 will welcome hackers of all types: makers,
artists, educators, experimenters, tinkerers, and more – anyone who is interested in playing with technology, coming up with new ideas, learning from others, and sharing knowledge. Now an annual event.
—————————————-
September 26-29, 2025
Brussels, Belgium
The annual self-organized conference on digital rights and data protection draws people from across Europe and beyond to come together to advocate for freedom in the digitalized world, plan actions against attacks on civil liberties and increasing surveillance, and seek discussions with decision-makers.
—————————————-
September 30, 2025
Brussels, Belgium
Privacy Camp is organised by European Digital Rights (EDRi), in collaboration with its partners the Research Group on Law, Science, Technology & Society (LSTS) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Privacy Salon vzw, the Institute for European Studies (IEE) at Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles, the Institute of Information Law (IViR) at University of Amsterdam and the Racism and Technology Center.
—————————————-
October 4, 2025
Boston, MA, USA
Instead of hosting one LibrePlanet conference in 2025, the Free Software Foundation is planning a jam-packed anniversary year, filled with several new and exciting activities in 2025, culminating in a final celebration in Boston in October.
—————————————-
November 7-9, 2025
Barcelona, Spain
Mozilla Festival is where passionate individuals unite to build a better Internet. Reclaiming the Internet starts with all of us. At the Mozilla Festival, participants unlearn defaults, rethink power, share bold ideas and have thoughtful discussions that drive real change. Join us in shaping a digital future that’s more open, inclusive, and firmly grounded in fundamental rights.
November 10-13. 2025
—————————————-
Lisbon, Portugal
“The world’s largest technology conference.” Founded in 2009, Web Summit focuses on Internet and emerging technologies, marketing, and venture capitalism. Partners range from Fortune 500 companies to start-ups, and attendees represent all levels and sectors of the global technology industry.
Sponsored by: Traceport.Io
New Saas tool to help Charities to build trust and transparency via Distributed Ledger
Read more the launch at RSA and hear from founder Bridget Doran here.
