Vort3x | Cybersalon | March 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
Cybersalon Events
Book launch on Eastercon- British National Science Fiction Convention !
Our new book with 25 speculative fiction stories published by Cybersalon Press is out! “All Tomorrow’s Futures” will be launched at EasterCon on Saturday 30th March 5.30pm (Telford, UK) – join us if we are attending. We will be in Dealers Room, with editors Stephen Oram, Benjamin Greenaway, authors Eva Pascoe and Vaughan Stanger and experts who contributed to the book attending on the day, plus we will be hosting a special panel on “AI and Art of Foresight” Sunday 4pm and VR room to meet contributing authors from outside of UK hosted by Editors
Book “All Tomorrow’s Futures” Pre-order here
More on Eastercon 2024 Dealers Room here
NEWS
Data Broker Collects and Sells Abortion Clinic Visitors’ Location Data
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US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has sent a letter asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and punish a data broker that collected location data pertaining to 600 visitors to abortion clinics and sold it to an anti-abortion group that used it to target them with misinformation, Karl Bode reports at TechDirt. Wyden points out that the same data could be used by prosecutors to put women in jail, and urges Congress to legislate to ensure that extremist politicians can’t buy this type of information without a warrant.
Elon Musk Sues OpenAI for Pursuing Profit
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Elon Musk has filed suit against OpenAI, accusing CEO Sam Altman of betraying its founding mission by developing artificial general intelligence for profit for owner Microsoft rather than benefit to humanity, Dan Milmo reports at the Guardian. Musk’s complaint says the case is intended to compel OpenAI to return to its original mission. Legal experts view the case as unlikely to succeed: Musk has no standing and can’t recoup the funds he invested as he did so long before the company changed direction. At TechDirt, Mike Masnick believes the case will fail because there is no contract for OpenAI to have violated.
EU Fines Apple €1.8 billion
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The EU has fined Apple €1.8 billion over restrictions it has imposed on music streaming services over the last decade that limited user access to streaming services outside of the App Store, with the result that users wound up paying more than they should have, Lisa O’Carroll and Dan Milmo report at the Guardian. The case grew out of complaints filed by Spotify. Apple intends to appeal, calling the market “competitive” and noting that Spotify leads the European music streaming market with a 56% share.
Energy and Water Crises Looms for AI Industry
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Open AI CEO Sam Altman has warned that the AI industry is heading for an energy crisis, Kate Crawford reports at Nature. Crawford doubts that his preferred solution – nuclear fusion – will be able to meet the need. Already, estimates are that an AI-driven search consumes four to five times the energy of conventional searches, and their demands are only likely to get worse. In addition, generative AI systems require enormous amounts of fresh water for cooling and electricity generation. US Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) is backing the Artificial Intelligence Impacts Act of 2024, which would set environmental standards and a reporting framework for developers and operators. At the Guardian, Jessica Traynor examines the catastrophic impact on Ireland’s water and energy systems of its growing number of data centers. At the University of Helsinki, Julia Velkova worries that the proliferation of Nordic data centers is undermining public values as well as putting pressure on electric grids.
UK Plans Transition to Digital Border
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The UK intends to replace physical biometric residence permits and residence cards with e-Visas that can be verified online, Ax Sharma reports at Bleeping Computer. While that adds convenience in that applicants for visas will no longer need to submit their physical passports and enables landlords and employers to check status more easily, the decision means that individuals have no way to prove their status without an Internet connection. The move is part of a plan to digitize the entire border and immigration system, including moving to facial recognition to facilitate contactless entry.
FEATURES & ANALYSIS
US Roads Community Exits Wikipedia
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In this article at Gizmodo, Thomas Germain follows the move of the community that maintains a collection of 15,000 articles on US roads and highways from Wikipedia to a new home at the longstanding website AARoads after accelerating criticism from other Wikipedians that their topic wasn’t noteworthy enough. A second problem was the use of maps, which violated the “no original research” policy. After debate, the rules were changed to allow visual sources – but the hostility of the debate led the US Roads group to feel unsafe. The group hopes eventually to return to Wikipedia.
Scam Ecosystem Profits from Selling Tools to Spammers
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In this article at 404 Media, Jason Koebler starts with approaches from influencers claiming to make five figures a month using AI to create TikTok pages from stolen celebrity clips and goes on to uncover a complex ecosystem of “content parasitism” that recycles clips lifted from YouTube videos, podcasts, and celebrities as well as Reddit AMAs and other material, some of its ChatGPT-generated. Koebler finds these spammers sell courses, tools, and coaching sessions on their own Discord channels; the real money is there, not in using those tools to create and spam content. At TechCrunch, Amanda Silberling reports that Discord took no action against a server that was used to distribute software and coordinate attacks on Mastodon in late February. Because these attacks target smaller Mastodon instances, which lack sufficient moderation tools and often have open registration, they can be highly disruptive and drive up server costs. The attack seems to have been sparked by a conflict between teenagers on two different Discord servers.
Blocking RSS
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In this posting, OpenRSS details moves made by Google and other technology companies to hinder the adoption of RSS, a protocol that makes it practical to follow dozens of blogs and other feeds on the open web. At its original launch, Google’s Chrome web browser included a button to add RSS subscriptions; it later disappeared without notice. Similarly, Google bought or created and then shut down Feedburner and Google Reader. In 2021, Google said it would bring back RSS support in Chrome – but it has yet to appear.
Scientists Merge Robots with Language Model Brains
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In this article at Scientific American, David Berreby studies projects that are attempting to make more capable robots by equipping them with internal large language models that can adapt more flexibly to changing circumstances and be more responsive to context. For now, these robots are safer than you might expect: their difficulties with physical tasks such as opening drawers and moving objects can’t be solved by improving their abilities with language.
San Francisco Crowd Attacks Waymo Self-Driving Car
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A crowd in San Francisco in mid-February used a firecracker to set on fire a Waymo self-driving car that was cruising a street in Chinatown during lunar New Year celebrations, Hyunjoo Jin, Mariana Sandoval and Abhirup Roy report at Reuters. The motive was not clear, but it follows a number of incidents in which people have blocked or disrupted self-driving cars.
DIARY
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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April 10-12, 2024
Boulder, CO, USA, and streaming
CWA strives to be the preeminent venue for open, multi-faceted, and balanced discussion of today’s challenging issues, and brings together intellectuals, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, activists, journalists, philosophers, and policy makers in events collaboratively planned by CU Boulder and Boulder community members for audiences both academic and non-academic. All events are free and open to the public.
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April 16-18, 2024
Gladstone, Australia
Everything Open is a conference focused on open technologies, including Linux, open source software, open hardware and open data, and the communities that surround them. The conference provides technical deep-dives as well as updates from industry leaders and experts on a wide array of topics from these areas. Everything Open embodies Linux Australia’s values, providing a space for the community to come together to learn from each other and participate in discussions.
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May 4-5, 2024
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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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 7-10, 2024
Katowice, 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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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.
