Vort3x | Cybersalon | February 15, 2025
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
Online – Monday 17th 5pm Zoom
Rapid AI revolution is impacting jobs and forcing us to upskill on short notice. How can Libraries, Knowledge Hubs and future Learning Centers in our towns help to support us in this new era – join us for a short chat with two leading architects who contributed to numerous ‘learning buildings’ in their architectural practice, from Internet Cafes to The Hive and world’s leading libraries. With Peter Clegg OBE and Bernhard Blauel, lead architect on Internet Cafés Cyberia (London, Paris, Bangkok, Manila)
Host: Eva Pascoe, co-founder of world’s first Internet Café Cyberia
NEWS
Your kids’ photos on Palantir? UK Government Orders Apple to Break Cloud Encryption
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In January the British government exercised a power included in the Investigatory Powers Act (2016) and secretly ordered Apple to install a backdoor to allow security officials to access any encrypted content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, Joseph Menn reports at the Washington Post, based on information provided by unnamed sources. Apple has in the past said it will depart the UK market rather than break its privacy promises to users. Under the IPA it’s a crime to disclose the existence of this type of order. Apple has the right to appeal to a secret technical panel. According to one source, Apple would not be allowed to tell customers that their data was no longer fully secure. No doubt the government is planning to handover the data to private contractors, leading to increasing risk of leaks, oversharing and data breach. Press on with your local MP to support digital privacy.
Tests Show Low-Cost DeepSeek is Competitive with ChatGPT
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In this article at Ars Technica, Kyle Orland runs a series of tests comparing output from DeepSeek and the best paid version of ChatGPT, and concludes that the two are competitive. At Wired, Matt Burgess reviews research showing that DeepSeek’s protections against abuse trail those of its Silicon Valley counterparts by a long way; given 50 malicious prompts, DeepSeek produced toxic content in response to each one. In a paper at Springer Nature, Marcus Arvan uses famous problems from the philosophy of science and philosophical psychology to show that their complexity makes it impossible to align the behaviour of large language models with human values. Finally, at Rest of World, Viola Zhou places the rise of DeepSeek in context: Chinese AI researchers increasingly prefer to stay home rather than seek jobs abroad, while restrictions on exporting chips from the US have forced Chinese engineers to innovate to make better use of older hardware.
So you think you can opt out of Facial Recognition?
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The US Department of Homeland Security has launched an audit of the Transportation Security Administration’s use of facial recognition technology at airports, following complaints from privacy advocates and politicians, Brandon Vigliarolo reports at The Register. At Papers Please, Edward Hasbrouck explores US Customs and Border Protection’s 2019 plans for facial recognition, which it intends to offer airlines and airports as a service. In a second posting, Hasbrouck discusses the difficulties of exercising the right to opt out of facial recognition.
Storm in Copyright Cup? – Proposed US Copyright Law To Create Worldwide Blocks
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The US’s proposed Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA), introduced by Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) would permit copyright holders to obtain court orders requiring Internet service providers and DNS resolvers earning less than $100 million in revenue annually to block foreign pirate sites. Because companies like Google offer international DNS services, the result could be worldwide blocking.
FEATURES & ANALYSIS
What happens when your phone security software supports ends and you don’t even know it
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In this article at Consumer Reports, Stacey Higginbotham discusses the danger when manufacturers of smart devices discontinue security updates following numerous incidents of botnets conducting DDoS attacks by harnessing such orphaned devices. Research shows that consumers are largely unaware of the risk and expect devices to continue working as expected even after software support ends and don’t realise they need to take them offline.
The Most-Enshittified Services
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In this article at Ars Technica, staffcompile a list of the most-degraded services as “enshittification”proceeds. Among the list: Google’s voice assistant and search, PDFs, televised sports, and Windows.
To Err is to Be Human? – research finds AI Errs Very Differently from Humans
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In this essay at IEEE Spectrum, Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders outline research to be done into the kinds of mistakes AI makes and how they differ from human errors. He suggests two primary options: make AI that makes more human-like mistakes, or built new error-correcting systems that can counter the specific types of mistakes AI makes. At the Guardian, Julia Kollewe reports that Alphabet, owner of Google, has dropped language from its ethical guidelines for AI that promised not to use AI for developing weapons and surveillance tools. At Rest of World, Ananya Bhattacharya reports that Indian politician Ajeet Madhavrao Gopchade has blamed misdirection in Google’s Maps navigation app for fatal accidents and is encouraging the Indian parliament to support local alternatives. Experts say, however, that the problem is not Google Maps but the difficulties of mapping Indian roads. Finally, at 404 Media, Emanuel Maiberg reports that “AI slop” – that is, AI-generated fake books – are beginning to find their way into public libraries via their digital catalogs.
Ofcom vague – as Open Safety Act Threatens Small Sites
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In this blog posting, Woof Group, which operates a Mastodon instance, provides an account of an Ofcom livestream session in which they tried to get answers to how they can comply with the Online Safety Act. Ofcom repeatedly refused to answer questions and was vague in responding to those it did answer. On Mastodon, technology lawyer Neil Brown frustratedly follows an Ofcom session on “low-risk” services that similarly fails to produce helpful answers for small sites and federated servers.
Kafka will turn in his grave – Musk Ally Plans AI Throughout US Government with ‘computer says no’ to be your everyday experience
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In this article at 404 Media, Jason Koebler, Joseph Cox, and Emanual Maiberg outline the plans of former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd, now head of the US General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services for deploying AI across the US government, based on audio 404 Media obtained of a meeting with government technology workers. Among the changes Shedd wants to make are creating “AI coding agents” that would write software for government agencies, using the Login.gov service to aggregate data across agencies (even though current employees say this is illegal), and creating a centralized database of contracts so they can be analyzed.
DIARY
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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 and Law 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 the replacement 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 20 academic centers of excellence from the EU, the US and beyond. As a world-leading multidisciplinary conference, CPDP offers the cutting edge in legal, regulatory, academic, and technological development in privacy and data protection, gathering academics, lawyers, practitioners, policy-makers, industry and civil society from all over the world in Brussels to exchange ideas and discuss the latest emerging issues and trends. This unique multidisciplinary formula has served to make CPDP one of the leading data protection 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 12-15, 2025 (TBC)
Athens, Greece
The eighth annual ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency will have a cross-disciplinary focus that brings together researchers and practitioners interested in fairness, accountability, and transparency in socio-technical systems.
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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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Lillestrom, Norway
The IGF is a global multi-stakeholder platform that facilitates the discussion of public policy issues pertaining to the Internet. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the World Summit for theInformation Society.
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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.
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August 15-17, 2025
New York, NY, USA
HOPE 16 will welcome hackers of all types: makers, artists, educators, experimenters, tinkerers, and more – anyone who is interested in playing with technology, coming up with new ideas, learning from others, and sharing knowledge. Now an annual event.
