Vort3x | Cybersalon | February 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.
Cybersalon events | News | Features | Diary | Jobs
Cybersalon Events
Who is afraid of Cashless Society? – Discussion Panel and preview of Cybersalon Report on Cashless Society prepared as part of UK government consultation. Date tbc (most likely mid April), we will share on FB and Email when date confirmed but it will be an exciting venue!
Please let us know your view on Digital Pound in the Survey here – we plant 1 tree for every 4 completed survey (with certified “One Tree” organization responsible for re-forestration in Global South)
NEWS
=====
US No-Fly List Leaks Online
———————————————————————-
A Swiss hacker found a copy of a 2019 version of the US no-fly list on an unsecured airline server, Mikael Thalen and David Covucci report at The Daily Dot. The list, which had 1.5 million entries, also included the details of 1,000 CommuteAir employees and a large amount of company data. At Papers, Please, Edward Hasbrouck analyzes the available information about the list and calls it a “#MuslimBan” because of the prepondrance of Arabic and Muslim-seeming names. Hasbrouck also reports that US Customs and Border Patrol plans to require even more information from international air travelers; a public consultation is open until April 3, 2023.
Getty Images Sues Stable Diffusion for Copyright Infringement
———————————————————————-
Getty Images has issued a “letter of action” stating its intention to sue the creators of image generator Stable Diffusion in the High Court of Justice in London claiming the company illegally scraped millions of images from its site to train its software, James Vincent reports at The Verge. Getty says it does not believe that Stable Diffusion is covered by “fair dealing”, the UK’s term for the US’s “fair use”. An independent audit of Stable Diffusion’s training data set found a large portion of it was taken from Getty and other stock image sites, as evidenced by the presence of Getty’s watermark on some of the generated images.
Artist’s NFTs Found Guilty of Trademark Violation
———————————————————————-
A New York jury has ruled that artist Mason Rothschild violated Hermès’s trademarks when he sold $1 million worth of NFTs of images of the company’s Birkin bags he covered in fur and called “MetaBirkins”, McCormick reports at the Guardian. The case sets an early precedent for trademark use in the metaverse.
Ten Reinstated Twitter Accounts Generate $19 million in annual revenues
———————————————————————-
The Center for Countering Digital Hate finds that ten previously banned Twitter accounts reinstated by Elon Musk generate enough engagement to earn Twitter about $19 million in annual advertising revenue, Taylor Lorenz reports at the Washington Post. CCDH found multiple examples of ads from major international and US brands appearing next to content from the ten extremist influencers, one of whom was recently sentenced to 60 days in jail for his role in the January 6 insurrection. In an article at Weaponized, Caroline Orr Bueno studies a tweet to understand why and how it goes viral.
UK Government Considers Digital Pound
———————————————————————-
The Bank of England and HM Treasury have issued a public consultation on a digital version of the pound, which they believe will be needed at some point, Simon Sharwood reports at The Register. The consultation paper rejects the idea of distributed ledgers and blockchain-based solutions in favor of centrally-governed databases. No decision has been made to proceed with a digital pound; the consultation merely proposes additional preparatory work. The consultation continues until June 7, 2023.
FEATURES AND ANALYSIS
=====
Moscow’s Surveillance System
———————————————————————-
In this article for Wired, Masha Borak explores Moscow’s public safety system Safe City, which has been built over the years since 2015 and made Moscow the world’s seventh most-surveilled city. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its 217,000 surveillance cameras and automated facial recognition have been used to target journalists, protesters, and political rivals. The system was specifically designed as a black box offering no opportunity for regulation or transparency. Moscow is now planning to incorporate video streams for other regions into its system and develop software to predict and manage riots.
OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers to Build ChatGPT
———————————————————————-
In this article at Time, Billy Perrigo finds that OpenAI paid Kenyan subcontractors working for the outsourcing company Sama less than $2 an hour to label examples of hate speeech, sexual abuse, and violence in order to teach ChatGPT to detect these abuses when it encountered them and avoid incorporating them into its responses. At the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, Timnit Gebru tells Paris Marx why it’s important to avoid falling for the hype around ChatGPT and other AI tools.
Fighting Fake Reviews
———————————————————————-
In this article at the New York Times, Maria Cramer studies the methods used by sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor to combat the posting of hundreds of thousands of fake reviews each year. While they represent a small percentage of the reviews that appear on the sites, their presence on even one site damages trust in all review sites.
DoNotPay Exaggerates “Robot Lawyer” Claims
———————————————————————-
In this article at TechDirt, Mike Masnick caps a series of articles calling into question DoNotPay’s claims to have successfully contested thousands of parking tickets in court. The latest: company CEO Josh Browder, who invented his “robot lawyer” as a university student, has decided not to follow through with offering $1 million to any lawyer who would use DoNotPay’s AI in court. In an earlier article, Kathryn Tewson studies DoNotPay’s claims using her legal expertise and public data and finds little substance in the company’s claims.
ChatGPT and Its Limitations
—————————————————————
In this article at The New Yorker, Ted Chiang compares ChatGPT to blurred JPEGs and the process of training it by scraping text from the web to applying lossy compression to images. Since we have the actual web to consult, he asks, where is the benefit in consulting a statistically compressed version of it? At CIGI, Blayne Haggart calls ChatGPT a technical triumph, but at heart “still just pattern recognition” and deplores the current tendency to redefine knowledge as gathering masses of data and computing power and overweight the significance of correlation. “Dataism”, he writes, is a habit we can break in favor of understanding.
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
——————–
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
State of the Net Conference
——————–
March 6, 2023
Washington, DC and online
The Internet Education Foundation presents America’s premier Internet policy conference series. It brings together Internet stakeholders in government and in the private sector to explore the potential of a decentralized global Internet to promote communications, commerce and democracy.
——————–
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.
——————–
March 20-24, 2023
Online
Join 1000s of activists in diverse global movements fighting for a more humane digital world.
Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection
——————–
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 and provides them with an arena to exchange ideas and discuss the latest emerging issues and trends.
——————–
June 1-2, 2023
Boulder, Colorado, USA
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.
——————–
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.
Workshop on the Economics of Information Security
——————–
July 5-7, 2021
Geneva, Switzerland
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. The main topic of the 22nd WEIS is Digital Sovereignty. The conference is co-hosted by the University of Geneva and United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR).
——————–
Las Vegas, NV, USA
August 10-13, 2023
The world’s largest hacking conference.
——————–
Postponed to late summer 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.
ONGOING
—————————————-
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.
—————————————-
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.
—————————————-
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
—————————————-
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.
—————————————-
Ongoing series of events on topics such as new legislation, using data to combat counterfeit goods, and trends in online advertising.
—————————————-
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.
—————————————-
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).
—————————————-
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.
—————————————-
Frequent events on topics such as cybersecurity, digital tax, online content moderation, and upcoming EU legislation.
—————————————-
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.
—————————————-
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
—————————————-
HAI’s series of events covers AI-related topics such as upcoming regulation, issues with algorithms, health, and AI and society.
Legal Frontiers in Digital Media 2020
—————————————-
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.
—————————————-
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.
—————————————-
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.
—————————————-
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.
—————————————-
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.
—————————————-
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.
—————————————-
Singularity University’s upcoming events include reimagining primary education and a series of executive programs aimed at various countries.
