Vort3x | Cybersalon | December 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
Chaos Communication Congress – still time to register as Volunteers (if you are accepted, Cybersalon has two travel scholarships to support your participation)
December 27-30, 2024
Hamburg, Germany
The 38th Chaos Communication Congress (38C3) is Europe’s largest hacker gathering, featuring lectures, workshops, and other events relating to security, privacy, freedom of expression, and cryptography.
NEWS
UK Government Funds AI Projects andTechnical Degrees
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Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation, will invest up to £2 million in projects from UK-registered organisations that will accelerate relevant AI competency in a responsible and ethical manner in the construction, transport and logistics, creative, and agriculture and food processing industries, the UK government’s InnovationFunding Service has posted at Gov.uk. At UK Tech News, Oscar Hornstein reports that the UK government will fund more than 4,700 technology degrees as part of a £564 million drive to encourage more people to study areas such as biology, engineering, and environmental sciences.
Chinese Hack Affects Eight Telcos andDozens of Countries
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US deputy national security adviser Anne Neuberger says that the Chinese hacking has penetrated at least eight US telecom companies and affected dozens of nations, Aamer Madhani reports at APNews. However, only a small number of Americans’ calls and texts have been compromised. At Lawfare, cybersecurity expert Susan Landau blames CALEA, a 1996law requiring Internet service providers to install equipment to enable wiretapping on demand from law enforcement. At the time the law was passed, she and many others warned it could lead to this type of attack.
Zipcar Outage Shows Danger of Relying Solely on Apps
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A Zipcar app outage prevented customers from renting cars, locking or unlocking them, and/or returning cars before their rental period ran out, Scharon Harding reports at 404Media. Zipcar says the outage was related to increased traffic from its Black Friday promotion. Harding argues that the incident shows the danger of relying entirely on apps.
Sabotage Damages Undersea Data Cables
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The German defense minister has said that damage to two undersea fiber optic cables in the Baltic Sea was probably sabotage, Dan Malmo reports at the Guardian. There are more than 100 submarine cable faults every year, most of them accidental. At TechRadar, Ellen Jennings Trace reports that in June 2025 NATO intends to deploy sea drones to monitor and protect cables in the Mediterranean and Baltic seas. Undersea cables carry about 95% of international data and $10 trillion in daily financial transactions.
US Department of Justice Files Proposals for Google Breakup
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The US Department of Justice has filed its proposals for remedies following a US judge’s ruling that Google is a monopoly,Michael Liedtke reports at AP News. Among the proposals are selling Chrome, placing restrictions on Android, preventing Google from preferencing its own services or paying other companies to make its search engine the default choice, licensing its search index data, and barring it from buying or investing in adtech companies.Google’s chief legal officer, Kent Walker, calls the proposals a “radical interventionist agenda”. At Techdirt, Mike Masnick has favored requiring the company to license access to its search results via real-time APIs. At Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow favors spinning out, but not selling, Chrome. TheDoJ has until April to file final proposals.
FEATURES & ANALYSIS
Bellingfest Presents Past and Future of Video and Audio Analysis
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At this YouTube page, Bellingcat has posted video clips from its recent two-day Bellingfest event, where a wide variety of experts on open source research, journalism, and technology discuss the past and future of visual and audio analysis and its use in reporting.
EU AI Act Needs Stronger Oversight
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In this essay at Yale University Journal, Sandra Wachter examines the limitations and loopholes in the EU’s AI Act and AILiability Directive. Lobbying by big technology companies and member states watered down the legislation so that oversight is weak, and the resulting law relies too heavily on self-regulation and provides far-reaching exceptions for both public and private sectors. Wachter provides suggestions for closing these loopholes.
Scientists Modify New Telescope for National Security
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In this article at The Atlantic, RossAndersen finds that the new $1 billion Vera Rubin telescope situated in Chile’sAtacama desert could compromise US national security when it becomesoperational in 2025 and begins capturing full-sky images that will each containmore than 40 billion objects. Among them are likely to be spy satellitesoperated by the Pentagon that it would prefer to keep secret. The telescope’sdirector has agreed to set up an automated system for removing classifiedinformation from the collected images that will also impose a three-day delaybefore astronomers can see them.
Cryptocurrency Industry Donates $200Million to US Election Candidates
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In this YouTube clip, Molly White summarizes a year of her reporting on the $200 million the cryptocurrency industry shoveled into the US election, primarily Congressional races, and its effects. The cryptocurrency industry donated more money than any other industry, and about half of all corporate spending on this election. Fifty-eight races of the 68 races the industry spent money on went the industry’s way – though in many cases they donated to likely winners and then claimed responsibility for their wins. White warns that this year is likely just the first in a very long campaign to install crypto-friendly regulators and laws.
ChatGPT Spreads Misinformation to NewsSites
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In this article at The Verge, Elizabeth Lopatto tracks down the often-repeated claim that as an outgoing US president Jimmy Carter pardoned his brother, Billy and finds that it’s one of several incorrect answers that ChatGPT gives when it’s asked how many US presidents have pardoned their relatives, as Joe Biden just has. The Carter falsehood has made its way into a number of reputable news publications, including the Hindustan Times. Lopatto goes on to provide further evidence that ChatGPT cannot be relied upon for accurate reporting.
DIARY
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December 15-19, 2024 and online
Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
The 19th IGF, “Building Our Multistakeholder Digital Future”, will focus on four main themes: harnessing innovation and balancing risks in the digital space; enhancing the digital contribution to peace, development, and sustainability; advancing human rights and inclusion in the digital age; and improving digital governance for the Internet We Want.
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January 10-12, 2025
Washington, DC, US
ShmooCon is an annual east coast hacker convention hell-bent on offering three days of an interesting atmosphere for demonstrating technology exploitation, inventive software and hardware solutions, and open discussions of critical infosecurity issues. The first day is a single track of speed talks called One Track Mind. The next two days bring three tracks: Build It, Belay It, and Bring It On.
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February 1-2, 2025
Brussels, Belgium
FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels. You don’t need to register. Just turn up and join in!
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February 4-5, 2025
London, UK
The third annual State of Open Con will focus on Open Technology including open source software, open hardware, open data, open innovation, open standards, and the value that the open community brings to the UK and its digital economy. Alongside a diverse range of topics, the event promises to include a diverse range of speakers and participants.
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February 11, 2025
Washington, DC, US
Annually attracting over 600 attendees, the State of the Net Conference provides unparalleled opportunities to network and engage on key policy issues. It is also the only Internet policy conference with over 50 percent of Congressional staff and government policymakers in attendance, making it the perfect setting to explore important, emerging trends.
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February 24-27, 2025
Taipei, Taiwan and online
Each edition of RightsCon convenes business leaders, policy makers, general counsels, government representatives, technologists, academics, journalists, and human rights advocates from around the world to tackle pressing issues at the intersection of human rights and technology. RightsCon is where the global community comes together to build strategies and drive forward change toward a more free, open, and connected world.
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March 25-27, 2025
Munich, Germany
The ACM Symposium on Computer Science andLaw is a leading venue for cross-disciplinary scholarship at the intersection of computer science and law. Computer scientists have often interpreted law as though it can be reduced purely to a finite set of rules about which the only meaningful computational questions are those of decidability and complexity.Legislators and policy makers have often advocated general, imprecisely defined requirements and assumed that the tech industry could solve whatever problems arose in designing and implementing products and services to conform to those requirements. Central to the study of “computer science and law” is there placement of these limited, disciplinary approaches with an emphasis on interdisciplinary research and development. Existing work on privacy, fairness, freedom of expression, and other essential social values demonstrates the importance of crossing disciplines and provides examples of both success and failure.
Cambridge Disinformation Summit
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April 23-24, 2025
Cambridge, UK
The 2025 Cambridge Disinformation Summit is designed to convene global thought leaders to discuss research regarding the efficacy of potential interventions to mitigate the harms from disinformation.
Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection
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May 21-23, 2025
Brussels, Belgium
CPDP is a non-profit platform carried by 20academic centers of excellence from the EU, the US and beyond. As aworld-leading multidisciplinary conference, CPDP offers the cutting edge inlegal, regulatory, academic, and technological development in privacy and dataprotection, gathering academics, lawyers, practitioners, policy-makers,industry and civil society from all over the world in Brussels to exchangeideas and discuss the latest emerging issues and trends. This uniquemultidisciplinary formula has served to make CPDP one of the leading dataprotection and privacy conferences in Europe and around the world.
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May 29-30, 2025
Los Angeles, California, US
PLSC started in 2008 to bring privacy law scholars and practitioners from around the world together to discuss current issues in information privacy law and policy. The conference is, first and foremost, a paper workshop. Authors, commentators, and participants all work together to discuss ideas contained in the drafts. PLSC is conducted under the Chatham House Rule.
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May 12-14, 2025
Strasbourg, France
EuroDIG is a platform for discussion and the exchange of ideas on emerging issues and challenges concerning the Internet. All stakeholders are invited to shape the agenda jointly and take part in the discussion. The inclusive and continuous dialogue, which culminates in an annual event, has taken place in a different European country every year since its inception in 2008. The resulting “Messages” are forwarded to policy makers and fed into the annual global UN Internet Governance Forum (IGF).
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May 26-28, 2025
Berlin, Germany
The motto for the 2025 festival for digital society is “Generation XYZ”. The program will once again bring the most important topics relating to the Internet and its communities, and the opportunities and challenges that lie in the digitalization of society to the stages.
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June 10-11, 2025
Mechclen, Belgium, and online
TICTeC 2025 will bring together people working on defensive technology against threats to democracy, and those who are using technologies constructively to enrich and strengthen the heartbeat of civic and democratic life. With a distinctive mix of tech practitioners, civil society leaders, and academic researchers, TICTeC isn’t just about showcasing cutting-edge pro-democracy tech innovations, at TICTeC you can learn about everything from combating corruption and misinformation to empowering communities and enhancing civic participation. It is a unique platform where attendees connect and collaborate.
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June 19-21, 2025
Boston, MA, USA
State of the Map US is the largest gathering of OpenStreetMap community members from across the country. In 2025 we will spotlight the successes and challenges of mobility mapping with the theme “Charting the Course”. The event will connect mappers, businesses, academics, government agencies, and nonprofits, who all collaborate around the free and editable map of the world.
Workshop on the Economics of Infosecurity
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June 24-25, 2025
Tokyo, Japan
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.
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July 8-11, 2025
Geneva, Switzerland
Organized by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in partnership with 40 UN sister agencies and co-convened with the government of Switzerland, the AI for Good Global Summit is the leading UN event on AI. It brings together top names in AI with a high-level lineup of global decision makers. Our goal is to identify practical applications of AI, accelerate progress towards the UN SDGs and scale solutions for global impact.
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July 21-23, 2025
San Francisco, CA, USA
TrustCon is the global conference dedicated to trust and safety professionals who are responsible for the challenging work of keeping our platforms and communities safe. This conference will create an enduring and supportive community; offer workshops and presentations focused on the practice of trust and safety; and explore successes, lessons learned, and the future of the field. Attendees have the opportunity to collaborate, hear from trust and safety thought leaders, and connect with peers from all over the world.
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July 31-August 3, 2025
Portland, OR, USA
Software Freedom Conservancy hosts Free and Open Source Software Yearly to focus on the creation and impact of free and open source software. The event includes community-led tracks with talks and workshops over four days. Previous topics have included community building, education, development and legal and licensing issues. We will use free software to run our conference and reduce the amount of proprietary software that is treated as default.
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August 7-9, 2025
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Since 2006, Netroots Nation has hosted the largest annual conference for progressives, drawing thousands of attendees from around the country and beyond.
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August 06-09, 2025
Nairobi, Kenya, and online
Wikimania is the annual celebration of all the free knowledge projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation with four 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 7-10, 2025
Las Vegas, Nevada, US
Def Con is one of the world’s largest hacker conventions.
