Vort3x | Cybersalon | June 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
Events
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21st June – Our Friends at Newspeak House are hosting Democracy Co-Working Day
Join Civic Power, Fair Vote, Nesta, Radix Big Tent and other groups on this drop in session
Make alliances, friends and find new networks in time for the next elections
NEWS
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Reddit Begins Charging for Access to Its API
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Reddit will follow Twitter’s lead and begin charging companies that crawl Reddit for data will be charged for the use of its API, Kyle Wiggers reports at TechCrunch. The API will remain free to researchers and to developers who build tools that help people use Reddit. The company is preparing for an IPO, expected later this year.
Facial Recognition + combo for Big-City Surveillance in US Suburbs- UK next?
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Companies like the startup Fusus are building public-private camera networks in small US cities, mimicking the systems already in place in large urban areas, Avi Asher-Schapiro reports at Context. Fusus in particular can link together camera feeds, automatic license plate number readers, gunshot detection, and predictive policing into an AI system that can scan the city for images of specific people.
What is your DNA? Environmental DNA Poses New Privacy Risk
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Researchers have found that readily affordable techniques they have developed for recovering environmental DNA for work studying wildlife also can recover medical and ancestry information from minute fragments of shed human DNA, Elizabeth Anne Brown reports at the New York Times. Privacy advocates are concerned law enforcement will rush to use these tools even though the science is not yet mature enough.
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The European Data Protection Board has fined Meta a record €1.2 billion for violating the General Data Protection Regulation by transferring EU users’ data to servers in the US, CNN reports. Meta says it will appeal. Noyb, which brought the case, reports that it took ten years and three court actions against the Irish Data Protection Commissioner and says that unless US surveillance laws change Meta will have to restructure its systems.
Instagram Enables Underage Sexual Content
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Instagram algorithms connect and help promote a vast network of accounts that openly commission and purchase underage sexual content, Jeff Horwitz and Katherine Blunt report at the Wall Street Journal, based on a joint investigation by the paper and researchers at Stanford and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Automated screening that relies on digital hashes to find known images can’t detect new material; detection and prevention requires tracking and disrupting pedophile networks.
FEATURES AND ANALYSIS
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Edward Snowden’s Revelations, Ten Years On
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In this interview at the Guardian, Ewen MacAskill interviews Edward Snowden, ten years after his revelations of mass government Internet surveillance. In it, Snowden says that both governments and technology companies betrayed our trust, and that it will happen again. Also at the Guardian, Nick Hopkins recounts how the paper published the revelations in defiance of the intelligence agencies.
History on TikTok but not as you know it
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In this article at Rest of World, Andrew Deck surveys the fad for creating alternative history videos that is sweeping TikTok, fueled by the availability of image generators. In many of them, Western countries never came to power and indigenous nations continued to flourish.
Better safe than sorry? Google and Apple Still Can’t Find Gorillas
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In this article at the New York Times, Nico Grant and Kashmir Hill find that eight years after Google’s image analysis software was caught mislabeling Black people as “gorillas”, both it and Apple still prevent their software from categorizing anything as a gorilla. Despite many advances in AI, it remains impossible to search for primates in photos on either company’s service.
Multilanguge Large Language Models Fail at Automated Content Moderation
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In this article at Wired, Aliya Bhatta examines platforms’ adoption of multilanguage large language models to improve their automated content moderation. Existing models are dominated by English language data; for many languages there isn’t sufficient digitized text even though they are spoken by hundreds of millions of people. MLLMs learn more general rules of language by training on texts in many languages so they can extrapolate from those with a lot of data to better handle the others. For technical reasons, MLLMs will not, Bhatta suggests, be as effective as platform companies are hoping; greater transparency is needed.
Digital Nomads Bring Gentrification and Rising Prices
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In this article at Rest of World, Stephen Witt finds that digital nomads – remote workers for technology companies – travel a worldwide circuit, bringing gentrification and rising prices with them. They generally flock to safe neighborhoods in smaller cities such as Medellín, Mexico City, or Goa. Statistics are scarce, but most digital nomads are thought to be white, Western, in their late 20s or early 30s, and working in software, marketing, or design. Is that the future of work or just “tail-end-of-pandemic” pattern?
DIARY
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*** 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. ***
Workshop on the Economics of Information Security
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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).
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London, UK
July 11, 2023
The UK Internet Governance Forum is the national Internet governance forum for the United Kingdom. It is a collaborative partnership that provides a local forum in the UK to engage industry, government, parliament, academia and civil society in debate on Internet Governance issues. The theme of this year’s event is “The Internet We Want – Empowering all People “.
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Las Vegas, NV, USA
August 10-13, 2023
The world’s largest hacking conference.
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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.
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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.
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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.
7 top ONGOING events
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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 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.
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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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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 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.
