Vort3x | Cybersalon | November 15, 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 EventsChristmas Event – Mince Pies & Mulled wine meet up
Dec 6, 2022 @NewspeakHouse 7pm – including fundraiser for Ukraine Refugee program
Games and Governance in virtual reality. Can immersive games teach us self-governance and improve democracy for human tribes? For this year’s Christmas event we will review and share game-playing on three virtual worlds that take interactivity and learning to the next level, while also providing gore and drama.
Join Eva Pascoe , Ben Greenaway, Stefan Lutschinger (Middlesex University), Simon Sarginson (Developer at Improbable), Karolina Janicka (Cybersalon Community Manager) and others on a journey through Metavibes for Good as we review and share game playing on three virtual worlds that take interactivity and learning to the next level, while not being short on gore and drama.
RSVP here providing gore and drama.
Past Events update
No Code NFT minting tool for fundraising artists
“How No-Code NFT platforms are helping digital artists to fundraise for their next shows” – a panel was held at LSE with @Halldonto (Sanctum Cyborgia), Federica Potenza (Digital Curator) and Cybersalon at LSE Generate (London) on 3 November. More on the tool and beta access on our event on 6th December.
NEWS
New Kinds of Disinformation Attacks Target Wikipedia
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A new report from Demos studies methods for promulgating disinformation on Wikipedia, Masha Boark reports at Wired.
For the report, researchers tracked 86 already-banned Wikipedia editors and found they used subtle changes to tilt the narrative on the Russia-Ukraine war on English-language Wikipedia in Russia’s favour. An influence operation of this type could take years to mount unnoticed – but even longer to identify and unpick. Wikipedia has a long history of coordinated attacks aiming to bias its content, and has developed numerous measures to defeat such attempts.
UK Plans to Share Hospital Data with Palantir
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Without consulting patients or offering an opportunity to opt out, the UK government is planning to extract patient-identifiable NHS hospital data and share it with Palantir with the claimed goal of understanding and reducing treatment waiting times, Lindsay Clark reports at The Register.
In 2021, in order to avoid a threatened judicial review, the government agreed not to extend Palantir’s contract past the pandemic without consulting the public. Separately, the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy has published guidance indicating that the government will keep data relating to electric and gas meters in the UK for up to ten years and will share it with other government departments and regulatory bodies in order to understand the impact of the energy price guarantee.w
Elon Musk and Twitter saga – as the last user switches off the lights
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After months of wrangling, Elon Musk closed on his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, and immediately fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, policy head Vijaya Gadde, and general counsel Sean Edgett, Donie O’Sullivan and Clare Duffy report at CNN. At the Guardian, Josh Taylor reports that a few days later Musk fired 50% of the company’s staff, some of whom have filed lawsuits over the sackings’ violation of US and European labor law. At Empty Wheel, Marcy Wheeler explains the financial reality of the purchase and its consequences. At Crooked Timber, Maria Farrell considers the consequences for employees, backers, advertisers, who fled the platform in Musk’s first week, and power users such as journalists, who are suddenly gaining a new understanding of the term “customer lock-in”. At Science, Kai Kupferschmidt discusses the early migration of medical and scientific researchers, for whom Twitter has been a vital platform for collaboration and public engagement. At TechCrunch, Kyle Wiggers reports federated social network Mastodon has added half a million users since the acquisition closed. At the Brookings Institution, Sanjay Patnalk, Robert E. Litan, and James Kunhardt argue that the Biden administration should investigate Musk’s acquisition on national security grounds. Finally, at MIT Technology Review, Chris Stokel-Walker interviews a recently-fired Twitter engineer on the increasingly unreliable infrastructure Musk cost cuts are bringing.
UK Competition and Markets Authority Blocks Facebook’s Acquisition of Giphy
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After an appeal, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has upheld its July order Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to sell the animated GIF creation website Giphy, Mark Sweney reports at the Guardian. The CMA said that keeping ownership of Giphy would allow Meta to choke the supply of animated GIFs to rivals such as Snapchat, TikTok, and Twitter, and said it was particularly concerned that Facebook had terminated Giphy’s advertising services. At The Atlantic, Kaitlyn Tiffany says GIFs are dying in any case, superseded by more efficient formats and falling out of use almost everywhere except Tumblr. Besides, she says, GIFs are “cringe”. Also at The Atlantic, Zachary M. Seward said in the GIF was dying – in 2012.
LinkedIn Wins Against hiQ Labs in “Data Scraping”
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The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has ruled in favour of Microsoft-owned LinkedIn in its six-year litigation claiming that hiQ had broken its terms and conditions by extracting user data using a variety of techniques including creating fake accounts, Aroof Ahmed reports at Digital Information World. LinkedIn is investing in measures to prevent such efforts in future.
FEATURES AND ANALYSIS
The Role of Data in War
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In this posting at Datasphere Initiative, Asaf Lubin, author of the recent book The Rights to Privacy and Data Protection in Times of Armed Conflict, considers the role of data in war, noting the new technologies that have been adopted in Ukraine. Few soft law norms or binding rules have been developed to govern such use. Lubin suggests several international fora that could lead the development of international legal frameworks, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, two United Nations entities, and the European Data Protection Board.
Fighting Back Against Digital Image-Based Sexual Abuse
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In this article at the Guardian, Ingri Bergo and Mathilde Saliou profile Norwegian activist Mia Landsem, who helps others deal with digital image-based sexual abuse. Landsem faced this problem herself, when an ex posted an intimate image of her on the internet; her clients struggle with that and other forms such as deepfake pornography, “upskirting”, and “revenge porn”, all of which are growing problems. The UK Revenge Porn Hotline handled 3,146 cases in 2019.
Nairobi Content Moderators for Facebook Call Their Jobs “Mental Torture”
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In this article at Time, Billy Perrigo profiles the Nairobi subsidiary of Sama, an “ethical AI” outsourcing company that provides data labelling and other services to major technology companies. Since 2019 this Nairobi office has been the epicentre of Facebook’s content moderation operation for all of sub-Saharan Africa, including Ethiopia, where content on Facebook may be contributing to civil war violence, yet the workers there so low-paid and working in such poor working conditions that many are leaving. Some have described the trauma of reviewing Facebook’s most unpleasant content as “mental torture”.
Amazon’s Smart Home Is Filled with Spies
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In this article at the Washington Post, Geoffrey A. Fowler offers a tour of Amazon’s smart home, in which, he says, every appliance is a spy. Fowler finds that Amazon collects more data than almost any other company, and backs up the claim by inspecting Echo speakers (which count snores), Ring doorbells (whose recorded video footage has been the subject of tens of thousands of police requests), TV devices Fire and Omni, Kindle and Fire tablets, integrated smart lights, Halo band, and numerous others, including smart toilets and soap dispensers.
Content Moderation in the Fediverse
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In this pre-print of a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Free Speech Law, Alan Z. Rozenshtein discusses how to do content moderation in the “fediverse” – that is, on federated social networking systems. Rozenshtein uses Mastodon, where many people are moving from Twitter, as a case study to understand the advantages and disadvantages of the federated approach, going on to suggest four ways policy makers can encourage the development of federated systems: become users, force the large social media sites to interoperate, take interoperability into account in antitrust cases, and improve incentives by tweaking the background legal regime for online content.
DIARY
*** Please check links to events listed below for participation restrictions and updates as to whether events will go ahead and what protocols may be in place. ***
ONE-OFF EVENTS & Grants
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Grants Deadline – Cybersalon has a number of grants for attending /presenting at Mozfest in March 2023. If you have a project that would benefit from presenting, get in touch with [email protected] before 1/12
MozFest 2023
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March 20-24, 2023
Join 1000s of activists in diverse global movements fighting for a more humane digital world.
Internet Governance Forum
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November 28-December 2, 2022
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and online
IGF is a global multistakeholder platform that facilitates the discussion of public policy issues pertaining to the Internet, The 17th IGF on Resilient Internet for a Shared Sustainable and Common Future will be a hybrid event. This year’s IGF program closely reflects the Global Digital Compact envisioned by the UN Secretary-General in his Our Common Agenda report. Accordingly the five themes are “Connecting All People and Safeguarding Human Rights”; “Avoiding Internet Fragmentation”; “Governing Data and Protecting Privacy”; “Enabling Safety, Security and Accountability”; and “Addressing Advanced Technologies, including AI”.
Conference on Robot Learning
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December 14-18, 2022
Auckland, NZ
The Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) is an annual selective, single-track international conference addressing theory and practice of machine learning for robots (and automation: where robot prototypes are scaled for cost effectiveness, efficiency, and reliability in practice). CoRL publishes significant original research at the intersection of robotics and machine learning.
World Crypto Conference 2023
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January 13-15, 2023
Switzerland
The World Crypto Conference will bridge traditional finance and DeFi products, focusing on blockchain, digital currencies, and digital assets. The goal of the WCC is to facilitate the connection between blockchain companies and startups, developers, investors, media, and traditional corporates:
Privacy Camp
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January 26, 2023
TBC and online
In 2023, the Privacy Camp invites you to participate in, and foster, a discussion about the critical state(s) of our a world in which the digital is, itself, critical. What does it mean to regulate digital technologies and infrastructures in times of crises?
Open Metaverse Conference
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February 8-9, 2023
Los Angeles, CA, USA
The OMC is the first conference dedicated to gathering the worlds of the Metaverse and Web3 in one place. It will be a big tent for creative, development, product, and business teams exploring their visions of a more immersive Internet – one that empowers creators and consumers to build the Open Metaverse together.
LibrePlanet 2023
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March 18-19, 2023
Location TBD and online
The 15th annual LibrePlanet is themed “Charting the Course”. Hosted by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), LibrePlanet provides an opportunity for community activists, domain experts, and people seeking solutions for themselves to come together in order to discuss current issues in technology and ethics. In 2023, LibrePlanet speakers will show ways of progressing the free software community’s understanding of new opportunities and new threats to the movement. We’ll learn about the impact artificial intelligence (AI) has upon the free software community, and the role software freedom has to play in working for ecological sustainability.
Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection
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May 24-26, 2023
CPDP is a multidisciplinary conference offering 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.
Privacy Law Scholars
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June 1-2, 2023
TBC
PLSC is the oldest and largest gathering of privacy scholars, researchers, and practitioners in the world. The conference is a paper workshop, intended to incubate and critique scholarship at the vanguard of the intersection of law and technology.
RightsCon
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June 5-9, 2023
TBC
RightsCon provides a platform for people from around the world – activists, technologists, business leaders, policymakers, journalists, and more – to come together and set the agenda for human rights in the digital age. Every year, the summit supports a program of 400+ sessions across 15+ program tracks, all sourced and selected from an open Call for Proposals.
Def Con
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Las Vegas, NV, USA
August 10-13, 2023
The world’s largest hacking conference.
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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Communities and Campaign Manager
Best for Britain (Permanent/Hybrid/Salary tbc) apply to [email protected]
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Sponsored by JobAt.BE
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