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

Cybersalon Events

Cybersalon.org Party to celebrate 30 years of Open Source

Date: Tuesday 3rd October 2023, 6.30-9.30pm

Location: Newspeak Hall and (online) VR Cyberia with Bill Thompson

We are delighted to host a party in tribute to the first Internet browser, which brought the Internet experience to users beyond academia and military settings. It democratized access to online information and enabled the opening of Internet Cafes worldwide (beginning with London’s Cyberia Café). The party will include a panel discussion featuring  Bill Thompson, Eva Pascoe, Stefan Lutschinger (Middlesex University) and Halidonto (digital artist) on the history of Mosaic, open culture, and their impact on today’s society, chaired by Luke Robert Mason (Futurist, Warwick University), as well as lightning talks from UK-based researchers on their open source projects.

RSVP Here

NEWS

UK Government Tries to Reassure Over End-to-end Encryption

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In response to questions in the UK’s House of Lords, a government minister said that the Online Safety Bill’s clause 122, which requires messaging services to scan end-to-end encrypted messages, will not be enforceable as long as the technology to meet such a requirement does not exist, Richard Speed reports at The Register. This statement has been widely interpreted as a government climbdown, but the requirement remains in the bill, awaiting a future administration to deem scanning “technically feasible”. At the Open Rights Group, Jim Killock and James Baker explain that even so in interviews government spokespeople are saying that the bill has not changed and that its research shows the technology is possible. The bill is expected to pass this fall.

Meta Overrules Oversight Board Recommendations

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Meta has overruled its independent Oversight Board’s recommendation to suspend the Facebook and Instagram accounts belonging to Cambodian former prime minister Hun Sen, who had posted a video containing violent threats against his political opponents, Rebecca Klar reports at The Hill. The Board says it stands by its decision. At The Verge, Casey Newton argues that in any case the Board’s deliberation process is too slow to matter; it took the Board two months to accept the case and eight months to decide it, during which time the video was viewed 600,000 times and a wave of political violence swept Cambodia.

Scientology Opposes Right to Repair

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Among the organizations weighing in on the triennial renewal of Section 1201 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act is Authors Services, the business name of the estate of Scientology creator L. Ron Hubbard, Jason Koebler reports at 404 Media. Authors Services wants the right to repair exemption modified to protect its $5,000 e-meters, which it says should be purchased and used only by qualified people with specific training and carry a specially negotiated license. At TechDirt, Masnick surmises that this sudden interest may have been sparked by the YouTube channel Play with Junk, which took apart an e-meter bought on eBay and concluded it was hand-built out of about $200 worth of components.

Bored Ape Buyers Sue Sotheby’s

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Unhappy buyers of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs have added Sotheby’s to the list of defendants in their class action lawsuit, arguing that Sotheby’s sale of a lot of 101 Bored Ape NFTs for $24.4 million duped buyers by lending them an “air of legitimacy”, Jon Brodkin reports at Ars Technica. The list of defendants includes Bored Ape creator Yuga Labs, four company executives, and numerous celebrity promoters such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Serena Williams, Madonna, and Justin Bieber. Sotheby’s buyer described at the time as a “traditional” collector, has been revealed as crypto exchange FTX, now bankrupt with its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, in jail awaiting trial on criminal charges.

Elon Musk Turns Off Starlink in Ukrainian Attack

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In his new biography of Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson writes that in 2022 Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his Starlink Communications Network to disrupt a Ukrainian naval attack on the Russian fleet near the Crimean coast, Sean Lyngaas reports at CNN. Musk says he didn’t turn it off because it hadn’t been activated; he merely refused to turn it on. Isaacson has conceded he made an error. At The New Yorker, Ronan Farrow explores in detail how Musk, best known for leading Tesla and buying Twitter, became essential to US military support for the Ukrainian war effort.

FEATURES AND ANALYSIS

Algorithms Censor Text But Not Images

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In this article at New Statesman, journalist and author Marie Le Conte writes about the cognitive dissonance invoked by social media services where explicit imagery is allowed but users must misspell text descriptions in order to get those past algorithmic content filters. Thus have been born terms like seggs (sex), corn (porn), le dollar bean (lesbian), mascara (penis), and unalive (suicide). Le Conte compares the situation to strip clubs: “Strip clubs are places where you can look but you cannot touch, and the internet is fast becoming a space where you can ogle but cannot spell.”

Cars Increasingly Invade Driver and Passenger Privacy

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In this article at Politico, Chlotilde Goujard reviews a report from the Mozilla Foundation that finds that increasingly they are collecting masses of information about drivers and passengers, even including their sexual activity. In-car sensors estimate people’s weight when they sit down, cameras record inside and outside the car, microphones listen to conversations, and connected smartphone apps track users. Although GDPR covers this data collection and processing, the law is poorly enforced against car companies. In a blog posting at Mozilla, Jen Caltrider, Misha Rykov and Zoë MacDonald say that cars are the worst category they’ve ever reviewed for privacy.

Tech Companies’ Water Use Rises Sharply

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In this article for AP, Matt O’Brien and Hannah Fingerhut count the cost in water to the US state of Iowa, where OpenAI built ChatGPT. Microsoft disclosed in its latest environmental report that its global water consumption rose 34% from 2021 to 2022 to nearly 1.7 billion US gallons. In one month during GPT-4’s training, Microsoft pumped about 6% of all the water used in the district to its West Des Moines data centers. University of California, Riverside researcher Shaolei Ren attributes this sharp increase over previous years to the need to cool computers used in its AI research, and estimates that ChatGPT uses half a liter of water every time a user asks from 5 to 50 questions, depending on location and weather. In the same period, Google reported a 20% rise in water use,

Ageism Costs Silicon Valley Opportunities

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In this article at the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo writes about the toxic and self-defeating ageism in Silicon Valley, reminding titans like Mark Zuckerberg that the over-50 demographic is the most lucrative and fastest-expanding part of the population. Where other industries recognize the opportunity presented by the 1.6 billion people who will be over 65 by 2050, Silicon Valley resolutely continues to pursue teen fads rather than build lucrative businesses solving the problems of older people.

ChatGPT Displaces South African Web Designers

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In this article at Rest of World, Kimberly Mutandiro finds that ChatGPT, along with free versions of WordPress and React, is replacing formerly thriving web designers, who are now struggling to find work. Also at Rest of World, Andrew Deck reports that tests in Bengali, Kurdish, and Tamil, all of which have millions of speakers, find that ChatGPT outputs fabricated words, illogical answers, and even complete nonsense due to the limited text available on the web for training.