Vort3x | Cybersalon | February 15, 2024
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
Happy Chinese New Year! We are entering Year of the Dragon, with hope that auspicious vibes of this high energy creature will give extra powers to campaigners for improvements in digital rights and online privacy!
Cybersalon Events
We will be launching our second book “All Tomorrow’s Futures” at EasterCon UK on 29 March
Get in touch if you attending– we will have books, goodies and a big discussion panel with Ben Greenaway and Stephen Oram (Editors) with writers contributing to this fabulous anthology of speculative fiction stories.
There will be London book launch hosted by Mike Butcher (TechCrunch editor) at Newspeak House in mid April (date tbc)– invites to follow soon
There will also be Cybersalon Press contribution to Royal Society of Arts and Manufacturing Festival on 2nd March (Strand/John Adams Street, RSA House) – there will be a workshop developing Manifestos for the Future, including AI Audit/AI Workbench for ethical monitoring for baked in bias
NEWS
Apple Announces New App Store Rules
Under measures Apple will roll out in March to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, users will be able to download apps from third-party app stores and choose from a range of browsers, Dan Milmo and Alex Hern report at the Guardian. The company warns that bypassing the App Store will bring users and developers greater security risks. Apple will charge developers who don’t use the App Store a “technology fee” of €.50 per installation per year after the first million installations. Developers who accept these terms will see the commission they pay Apple reduced from 15-30% to 10-20%. At the BBC, Tom Gerken reports that Spotify is attacking changes to Apple’s transaction fees in the US in response to a recent court ruling in favor of Epic Games. Under the new arrangements Apple will allow apps to use payment systems other than its own but charge 27% commission. At Nieman Lab, Joshua Benton says a 2022 carveout for reader apps should persist, but is concerned that the concept allows Apple to extend its “effective tax on apps” to the web.
Indian Court Sparks Global Removal of Reuters Investigation
A court in India has ordered the removal of a 6,000-word Reuters investigative report on the Indian startup Appin, which the wire service said hacked journalists, political activists, military officials, and business people around the world on behalf of clients, Michael Shaffer reports at Politico. Appin denied the allegations, and a group apparently representing the company’s digital training centres filed suit. The Indian court’s order to remove the article while the case is pending has led to its disappearance everywhere in the world; in the US, where the First Amendment should protect publication, threats from a law firm representing Appin co-founder Rajat Khare have seen the article disappear even from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Joint Statement Initiative Raises Privacy Concerns
The Joint Statement Initiative on E-commerce, a side letter to the World Trade Organization, is gaining momentum in its six-year effort to codify new rules for international online trade between the US and 88 other countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, Russell Brandom reports at Rest of World. Of particular concern are the negotiations regarding data protection and privacy, which could give the US in particular an avenue to challenge legal regimes around the world. In October, the Biden administration withdrew support for parts of the JSI while it considers whether and how to revise domestic policy.
New York Police Department Decommissions Patrol Robot
The New York Police Department is ending its six-month trial of a 400-pound autonomous robot as a means of deterring crime, Mack Degeurin reports at Popular Science. Used in many hospitals, warehouses, and other locations to patrol their premises, the egg-shaped Knightscope K5 is equipped with four cameras, can travel at a maximum speed of three miles an hour, and has a 360 degree range of motion. It also has a 16-microphone array and a button to connect people to remote representatives who can answer questions or receive incident reports.
Google News Boosts AI-generated Content
Google News is boosting rip-off sites that use AI to generate content and makes no effort to distinguish AI-written from human-written material, Joseph Cox reports at 404 Media. Google claims it focuses on the quality of content rather than how it is created; Cox notes that stories published at 404 Media do not appear in Google News searches. At The Register, Brandon Vigliarolo reports that researchers find that the results of searches on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are getting worse, as affiliate marketing and generative AI increasingly populate the results. Joseph Cox also reports at 404 Media that a website called OnlyFake claims to use neural networks to generate in minutes realistic photos of convincing fake IDs such as California driver’s licenses for $15. The fake ID generated in 404’s test successfully verified Cox to the OKX cryptocurrency exchange.
FEATURES & ANALYSIS
UK High Court Considers Craig Wright’s Claim to Have Invented Bitcoin
In this article at the Guardian, David Milmo explains the background of the suit brought in London’s High Court by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, which is seeking a ruling that Craig Wright is not the inventor of bitcoin. Since 2016, Wright has claimed he is the “Satoshi Nakomoto” who wrote the 2008 paper defining bitcoin; he won a libel case in 2022 against a blogger who called his claim fraudulent. COPA seeks to block Wright from continuing to sue developers working on bitcoin projects. In an opinion piece at CoinDesk, Paul Grewal favors COPA, arguing that Wright’s litigation against bitcoin developers amounts to harassment and is contrary to the spirit of the crypto economy.
In San Francisco Automation Undermines Social Infrastructure
In this article for the London Review of Books, Rebecca Solnit writes about the loss of San Francisco’s social infrastructure brought by automation. Driverless cars do not communicate with other road users as human drivers do, online shopping has killed off hundreds of small, independent businesses and their support for community, and the “eyes on the street” championed by Jane Jacobs have vanished. Stripping away everything that interferes with productivity is not necessarily a good thing, she writes, going on to look at the new city technology moguls now intend to build on the outskirts of the Bay Area.
Thousands of Companies Send Data to Facebook
In this article at The Markup, John Keegan outlines Consumer Reports’ finding that on average 2,230 companies sent data to Facebook on each of the 709 volunteers in its groundbreaking study. Some panelists listed as many as 7,000 companies providing data; the top companies are the data brokers LiveRamp, Acxiom, and Experian, followed by digital marketer Hearts & Science, Oracle Data Cloud, the data broker Epsilon, and retailer Home Depot. Consumer Reports also found many problems with the privacy tools Facebook offers. At Private Internet Access, Glyn Moody reports that Max Schrems and his NGO noyb.eu have complained to the Austrian data protection authority that Mta’s new ad-free subscription scheme for Facebook does not meet GDPR’s “free consent” requirement and is so expensive (€120-€156 per year) it almost guarantees few will take the option.
The End of Enshittification
In this Marshall McLuhan lecture, Cory Doctorow expands on the process and progress of “enshittification”. Four forces act to constrain companies’ behavior, he writes: competition, regulation, self-help (as when users install ad blockers), and workers. Doctorow traces how these forces have been undermined in past decades, but is optimistic now; both EU and US are being more aggressive in applying competition law, workers are beginning to unionize, and the EU has led lawmaking with GDPR, the Digital Markets Act, and Digital Services Act.
Biometrics, Society, and Surveillance
In this book published by the Share Foundation, a team of authors study the technical, legal, and practical considerations surrounding biometric surveillance across the world. Beyond the Face: Biometrics and Society highlights many harms these systems bring, inclidng extreme violence, wrongful arrests, eugenics, ethnic cleansing, exclusion, pushbacks, and persecution. Among the book’s key findings: the use of biometric technologies is intrinsically polical, secrecy prevails over all aspects of these systems, and no evidence can be found supporting the claim that biometrics keep people safe or contribute to justice.
DIARY
Financial Cryptography and Data Security
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March 4-8
Willemstad, Curacao
Financial Cryptography and Data Security is a major international forum for research, advanced development, education, exploration, and debate regarding information assurance, with a specific focus on commercial contexts. The conference covers all aspects of securing transactions and systems with the goal of bringing security and cryptography researchers and practitioners together with economists, bankers, implementers and policy-makers. Intimate and colorful by tradition, the FC program features varied events each year, including invited talks, academic presentations, technical demonstrations and more.
Workshop on the Economics of Information Security
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April 8-10, 2024
Dallas, Texas, USA
For more than 20 years, the 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.
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May 4-5
Boston, Massachusetts, USA and online
LibrePlanet provides an opportunity for activists, hackers, law professionals, artists, educators, students, developers, policymakers, tinkerers, and anyone looking for technology that respects the users freedom to come together in order to discuss current issues in technology and ethics. For 2024, the theme will be “Cultivating Community”.
Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection
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May 22-24, 2024
Brussels, Belgium
CPDP offers 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.
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Summer 2024
Krakow, Poland
Wikimania is the annual conference celebrating all the free knowledge projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation with days of conferences, discussions, meetups, training, and workshops. Hundreds of volunteers and Free Knowledge leaders from around the world gather to discuss issues, report on new projects and approaches, and exchange ideas.
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May 30-31, 2024
Washington, DC, USA
PLSC is a paper workshop conference whose goal is to provide support for in-progress scholarship related to information privacy law. To do so, PLSC assembles a wide array of privacy law scholars, policymakers, and practitioners who engage in scholarship. Scholars from non-law disciplines—including but not limited to surveillance studies, technology studies, feminist and queer studies, information studies, critical race studies, social sciences, humanities, and computer science—are critical participants in this interdisciplinary field.
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June 3-6, 2024
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The seventh annual ACM FAccT conference will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from June 3rd to June 6th, 2024. The conference brings together researchers and practitioners interested in fairness, accountability, and transparency in socio-technical systems.
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June 12-13, 2024
London, UK and online
TICTeC stands for The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, and is both an annual conference and a programme of year-round activities through mySoiety’s TICTeC Communities and TICTeC Labs projects. The conference brings together those from across the world who build, research, use, and fund civic technology to share research, knowledge, and experiences openly and honestly about its impacts and how to improve them in order to strengthen democracy, public participation, transparency, and accountability across the world.
EuroDIG
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June 17-19, 2024
Vilnius, Lithuania
The European Dialogue on Internet Governance (EuroDIG) is an open multi-stakeholder platform to exchange views about the Internet and how it is governed. First organised in 2008 by several organisations, government representatives and experts, it fosters dialogue and collaboration with the Internet community on public policy for the Internet – culminating in an annual conference that takes place in a different European city every year. EuroDIG ‘Messages’ are prepared and presented to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF).
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July 11-13, 2024
Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Since 2006, Netroots Nation has hosted the largest annual conference for progressives, drawing up to 4,000 attendees from around the country and beyond. The annual event brings together diverse voices from around the country and beyond.
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July 12-14, 2024
New York, NY, USA
The 15th HOPE will feature three days and nights of talks, keynotes, and workshops on topics from lockpicking to getting a ham radio license to analyzing Android malware. In the past, HOPE has showcased new movies, had cool live performances, done live radio broadcasts, and much more.
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August 8-11, 2024
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
Def Con is the world’s largest hacker conference.
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September 6-8, 2024
Nairobi, Kenya and online
State of the Map 2024 will bring together passionate mappers, data enthusiasts, technologists, and community members from all corners of the globe to celebrate the spirit of collaboration and open mapping. Building on the valuable lessons and experiences from the previous events, SotM is committed to making this edition even more accessible to everyone who wishes to partake in this grand celebration of open mapping, sharing passionate voices with the entire community.
