Vort3x | Cybersalon | April 15, 2022
Contents: Cybersalon events | News | Features | Diary | Jobs
Cybersalon Events
Cybersalon Events @ House of Commons CR9 Room 17 th May 6.30pm
=============
Eva Pascoe will chair our upcoming Central Bank Digital Currency discussion with Simon Youel, Brett Scott, Iza Kaminska (former FT columnist) and Paul Cockshott
Introduction by John McDonnell MP
Topic: Monetary Emancipation or Big Brother in your wallet?
Cybersalon’s event – introduced by John McDonnell – will discuss whether the Left should welcome or oppose the adoption of the Digital Pound and – if the former – what type of CBDC should created. So far, the Bank of England has avoided public debate by claiming that the economic and technical ramifications of digital currency are too complex for non-specialists. However, since everyone deals with money every day, the Left must insist that the views and needs of all sections of society inform the design of Britain’s new CBDC.
Speakers include Brett Scott, author of Cloud Money: cash, cards, crypto & the war for our wallets; Simon Youel, Head of Policy; Advocacy at Positive Money; Izabella Kaminska, Senior Finance Editor at Politico; and Paul Cockshott, economist, computer scientist; author of Towards A New Socialism.
Free but please sign up as places very limited
NEWS
=====
Residency:
Our friends at Newspeak House have a few places left for Newspeak Residency – for anyone interested in intersection of Tech and Politics, this is the place to be. Apply here.
UK court rules immigration data exception fails GPDR
———————————————————————-
Big News! A UK High Court judge has agreed with the Open Rights Group and the3million that the exception under which the Home Office refuses to allow migrants to see the data used to decide their cases is incompatible with Article 23 of the UK General Data Protection Regulation, ORG reports in a press release. ORG and the3million won a similar ruling from the Court of Appeal in 2018 The statutory instrument the government claimed remedied the issue did not meet the requirement of being a legislative measure, as needed for compliance.
Biden bans government use of commercial spyware
———————————————————————-
In an executive order, the Biden administration has banned government use of commercial spyware such as NSO Group’s Pegasus that might be abused by foreign governments, could be used to target Americans overseas, or pose security risks if installed on US government networks, Mark Muzzetti reports at the New York Times. This type of software gives governments and others the power to hack into and remotely control targeted mobile phones. The order applies only to commercial spyware, not software developed by American intelligence agencies.
Italian data protection authority bans ChatGPT – questionable tactic but interesting reasons
———————————————————————-
The Italian data protection authority, Garante Per La Protezione Del Dati Personali (GPDP), has ordered ChatGPT to stop collecting and processing Italian; personal data, alleging that the company lacks a lawful basis for doing so and that it fails to block users under 13, James Vincent reports at The Verge. In February, GPDP issued a similar order against the chatbot app Replika.ai. OpenAI has 20 days to say how it will comply; failure could attract fines of up to €20 million or 4% of annual global turnover. At AP News, Kelvin Chan reports that data protection authorities in Ireland, France, and UK are considering action. Also at The Verge, Adi Robertson reports that the Center for AI and Digital Policy calls for the US Federal Trade Commission to stop OpenAI from launching new GPT models because the latest iteration, GPT-4, violates the FTC's rules against unfair and deceptive practices. At the Washington Post, Leo Sands reports on two cases where ChatGPT has accused named individuals of crimes they did not commit; they may sue for defamation.
UK publishers sue Google for abuse of the ad market
———————————————————————-
A lawsuit filed against Google by former Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur and the law firm Hausfield claims that the company’s anti-competitive behavior and abuse of each part of the ad market has cost UK based publishers who sell ad space online up to 40% of digital ad revenue since 2014 and seeks up to £13.6 billion in damages, Bron Maher reports at the UK Press Gazette. The Competition Appeal Tribunal will need to choose a class representative and certify the suit as opt-out. A similar lawsuit was also filed in November by the law firms Geradin Partners and Humphries Kerstetter; its class representative is former Ofcom director Claudio Pollack. Unless Arthur and Pollack agree to collaborate, the court will have to choose a representative and claim to go forward. case is expected to take years to decide.
FBI takes down Genesis cybercrime site
———————————————————————-
Several domain names tied to the cybercrime shopping site Genesis Market, which sold access to passwords and other stolen data as well as bots, were seized by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation after an investigation that involved 14 countries and resulted in 400 law enforcement actions including 119 arrests and 208 searches and interviews worldwide, Brian Krebs reports at Krebs on Security. Genesis Market’s database held 59,000 registered users along with their purchases and activity histories.
FEATURES AND ANALYSIS
=====
Future of Life Institute calls for AI development pause – not everyone agrees
———————————————————————-
In this open letter from the Future of Life Institute, Elon Musk and numerous other signatories call for a pause on the development of artificial intelligence systems more powerful than OpenAI’s recent GPT- 4 for six months to ensure that their effects will be positive and their risks manageable. At the DAIR Institute, the four authors of the Stochastic Parrots paper respond that the harms from AI are present, real, and a result of the deployment of automated systems. Rather than fearmonger about a hyped future that may never come, they argue, regulatory efforts should focus on today’s systems of oppression and the dangers to our information ecosystem. The letter, they conclude, is a dangerous distraction.
US Congress questions TikTok CEO
———————————————————————-
In this video clip, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew answers five hours; worth of questions from the House Energy and Commerce Committee about the company’s data practices and connections to the Chinese government. In a summary at Wired, Dell Cameron reports that the committee’s questions inadvertently revealed the pointlessness of trying to pretend that TikTok was more culpable of privacy invasions than its competitors. At Engadget, Karissa Bell reports that the US state of Utah has passed two bills that require social media companies to obtain parental permission before allowing under 18s to use their sites and also require curfews, parental controls, and age verification. It is not clear how the state plans to enforce these laws.
AI’s copyright challenges
———————————————————————-
In this article at The Verge, James Vincent explores copyright issues raised by text and image generation AI systems as they train on and then copy the style of living artists and writers. The experts Vincent consults disagree widely about issues such as whether generated images can be copyrighted; whether legal permission is needed to use copyrighted works as training data; and what restraints should be placed on data collection. At EFF, Katharine Trendacosta and Cory Doctorow consider ways to use generative AI while respecting artists. The Writer’s Guild of America – West, for example, proposes to protect writers with a fule that AI cannot be an author for copyright purposes.
Smart headlamps enable new type of car theft
———————————————————————-
A new method of car theft is based on breaking into a car’s smart headlamp and using the exposed connections to gain direct access to the car’s Controller Area Network (CAN) bus and inject messages ordering the car to unlock for the thieves, Lindsay Clark reports at The Register. Ian Tabor, a cybersecurity researcher for EDAG Engineering Group, discovered the technique when his own vehicle was stolen using it.
Russia’s lost technology industry
—————————————————————
In this article at MIT Technology Review, Masha Borak explores the exodus of Russian technology
workers sparked by the invasion of Ukraine. At least 10% of the country's IT specialists hae left while
1,000 foreign companies have curtailed operations, leaving Russia increasingly cut off from the world's
technology industry. Yandex, the Russian equivalent of Google, has begun selling off some of its
businesses to state-controlled Vkontakte; what's left will soon split into a Russian company and a
Netherlands-headquartered company. While the Russian technology industry was not the country's
biggest, it was responsible for more than a third of growth in GDP.
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. ***
——————–
April 27-30, 2023
Istanbul, Turkey
ETH #Privacy is the first hackathon around privacy in Istanbul, organised by the Leading Privacy Alliance of web3. The LPA is a Swiss association with the purpose to speak up for everyone working in the web3 industry and make them aware of the need for privacy.
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 12-15, 2023
Chicago, Illinois, USA
ACM FAccT is an interdisciplinary conference dedicated to bringing together a diverse community of scholars from computer science, law, social sciences, and humanities to investigate and tackle issues in the emerging area of fairness, accountability, and transparency in socio-technical systems. Research challenges are not limited to technological solutions regarding potential bias, but include the question of whether decisions should be outsourced to data- and code-driven computing systems. We particularly seek to evaluate technical solutions with respect to existing problems, reflecting upon their benefits and risks; to address pivotal questions about economic incentive structures, perverse implications, distribution of power, and redistribution of welfare; and to ground research on fairness, accountability, and transparency in existing legal requirements.
——————–
June 5-8, 2023
Costa Rica and online
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.
——————–
September 28-30, 2023
Boston, MA, USA
Since its inception in 2012, this interdisciplinary conference has brought together leading scholars and practitioners to discuss legal and policy questions relating to robots.
——————–
October 8-12, 2023
Kyoto, Japan and online
The theme of the 18th IGF annual meeting is “The Internet We Want – Empowering All People”. IGF 2023 will be organized in a hybrid format with the goal ithat all participants, whether onsite or online, will be able to engage in an equally meaningful way in IGF sessions. Workshop and session organizers are expected to consider elements of interactivity and accommodate the hybrid format in their proposals. Stakeholders are invited to apply to organize different types of sessions at IGF 2023 within the deadline: 19 May 2023, 23:59 UTC.
—————————————-
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.
