Vort3x | Cybersalon | October 15, 2021
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.
Jobs | Cybersalon events | News: Whistleblower exposes internal Facebook research; Ransomware linked to hospital death; the case of the missing African IP addresses | Features: Debiasing AI; Building a truly secure internet; Copyright’s chilling effects | Diary
JOBS
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NHS Digital seeks a head of service for open data and publications. This role will lead a large team to develop data services across some of the highest-profile analytical areas including the NHS workforce, primary care, secondary care, and social care. Salary range £78,192-90,387.
Infosec Engineer – Mid level, with leading cybersecurity company based in Oxford
GCHQ seeks to fill a number of new mid-level to senior roles in various locations. Applicants must be British citizens and will require security clearance. Working knowledge of Persian an advantage.
Apply Here or here
Cybersalon Events
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Tales of the Cybersalon #4: Any Spare Change?
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November 30, 2021
Online
The fourth Tales of the Cybersalon workshop focuses on the future of money. A panel of experts including Dave Birch, Jana Hlistova, and Caron – Jane Lyon will discuss four new science fiction short stories to be selected from an open call. Submit stories by November 13.
Call for submissions | Event signup
NEWS
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Lawsuit alleges Alabama baby died due to ransomware attack
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A US lawsuit presents the first credible claim that a human death was at least partly caused by remote hackers, Kevin Collier reports at ABC News. The suit has been brought against the Springhill Medical Center by Teirani Kidd, the mother of a baby who was born with a severe brain injury and later died. Kidd claims the hospital missed a number of essential tests while failing to tell her that its computers were down due to a ransomware attack, depriving her of the option to deliver elsewhere. Read here.
Adopting bitcoin as legal tender goes slowly for El Salvador
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Technical problems and slow adoption have characterised the first month since El Salvador adopted bitcoin as legal tender, Wilfredo Pineda and Nelson Renteria report at Reuters. As of October 7, a survey of 233 companies by the Salvadoran Foundation for Economic and Social Development found that only 7% of Salvadorean businesses had taken payment in bitcoin, and a number of users reported losing money due to technical problems with the Chivo digital wallet. About $2 million daily is being sent via Chivo from bitcoin ATMs installed in Atlanta, Chicago, Houson, and Los Angeles; remittances to family back home accounts for about a quarter of the country’s GDP. Read here.
Legal case threatens to shut down AFRINIC
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Between 2013 and 2016, 6.2 million internet addresses assigned to Africa, or about 5% of the continent’s total, were obtained by Hong Kong-based businessman Lu Heng, SFGate reports. When AFRINIC, the low-cost membership organisation that distributes Africa’s IP address blocks, revoked Lu’s addresses on the basis that they were obtained via fraud, he persuaded a judge in Mauritius to freeze its bank accounts and his company filed an $80 million defamation claim. Tampering with AFRINIC’s Whois database has left the ownership of at least 675,000 of the addresses in dispute; many of the others are being used to host scams, spams, and Chinese-oriented gambling and pornography.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen files eight SEC complaints
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Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has filed eight complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission that accuse the company of misrepresenting to investors both the scale of its problems and its awareness of them in violation of securities laws, Tom McKay reports at Gizmodo. Among the complaints are claims that CEO Mark Zuckerberg lied to Congress, and that the company failed to act despite knowing that its services were being used to promote human trafficking, failed to follow internally recommended countermeasures against voter fraud conspiracy theories, and misled investors and the public about its role “perpetuating misinformation and violent extremism relating to the 2020 election and January 6th insurrection”. At Cloudflare, Celso Martinho explains the unrelated incident a few days later, in which maintenance errors knocked the entire company off the internet and caused widespread timeouts for other connections. Read here.
Half of Twitch payouts accrue to 1% of streamers
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According to data leaked by a person claiming to have access to internal information, the top 1% of paid Twitch streamers got over half of the $889 million the site has so far paid out in 2021, while three-quarters of paid streamers have taken home less than $120, Elliott Bentley and Kyle Kim report at the Wall Street Journal. More than 890,000 accounts made nothing or lost money, and half of those who have earned payouts have made less than $28. The leaked data goes back to 2019, and shows that in that time the amount paid out to streamers has nearly tripled to $100 million a month. Read here.
FEATURES AND ANALYSIS
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If AI is the problem, is debiasing the solution?
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In this report from European Digital Rights, Seda Gurses and Agathe Balayn analyse European proposals for regulating AI and conclude that the proposals focus on “debiasing” datasets and algorithms without understanding the limits of this approach. Debiasing, they argue, is not a silver bullet and focusing on it as a sole solution concentrates power in the hands of service providers and fails to address the broader problems of AI systems’ impact on society.
Leaked Apple videos show training to undermine third-party repair
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In this article at Vice, Matthew Gault examines eight leaked videos Apple made for its authorised repair partners to show how the company trains its authorised technicians to push customers to pay for more expensive repairs from Apple itself. The videos teach scripts claiming that third-party parts are less reliable and offer demonstrations purporting to show flaws in third-party components such as touch screens and batteries. Both the Biden administration and the US Federal Trade Commission have adopted right-to-repair policies. Read here.
Clearview AI plans new AI-powered identification tools
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In this interview at Wired, Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That outlines plans for new AI-powered tools such as “deblur” and “mask removal”, intended to help police find matches among the more than 10 billion images his company has scraped off the web. Ton-Thai believes that most people accept or support using facial recognition in solving crime despite the widespread pushback against his company’s tools. Critics warn that using AI to sharpen blurred images and calculate what a person’s face would look like without a mask will increase errors and misidentification. At the Federal Register, the Office of Science and Technology Policy is asking for input on the use of biometrics for the purposes of verifying identity and inferring attributes including individual mental and emotional states. Comments are due by January 15, 2022.
The chilling effect of the complexity of copyright
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In this blog posting at Walled Culture, Glyn Moody highlights a paper from the Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship creating the Copyright Anxiety Scale as a way of quantifying the chilling effect of the difficulty of navigating copyright issues. Rather than navigate the uncertainties around what is and isn’t legal, individuals self-censor.
The Facebook files
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In this video clip from C-SPAN, data scientist Frances Haugen testifies before the US Senate Commerce Subcommittee about the inner workings of Facebook and makes suggestions for reining it in. At the Wall Street Journal, Jeff Horwitz and other reporters analyze the thousands of documents Haugen leaked to find that the company ignored internal research findings that could improve safety to prioritize profits. At CNN, Ramishah Maruf reports the reaction of company’s global policy head, Nick Clegg, who downplays Haugen’s claims. At Medium, Matt Stoller argues that Haugen’s proposed reforms are too limited to “radically decentralize” its power. Finally, a new report published by the Panoptykon Foundation studies the ads directed at a single user and finds that even used correctly the site’s tools offer users little control over targeted surveillance ads.
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DIARY
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*** In light of the coronavirus outbreak, please follow your organization’s travel guidelines, and check links to events listed below regularly for participation restrictions and updates as to whether events will go ahead. ***
ONE-OFF EVENTS
Web Summit
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November 1-4, 2021
Lisbon, Portugal
At a time of great uncertainty for many industries, Web Summit will gather founders and CEOs of technology companies, fast-growing startups, policymakers, and heads of state to ask a simple question: Where to next?
Privacy Symposium Africa
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November 3-5, 2021
Online from Kampala, Uganda
Privacy Symposium Africa is a unique platform established to attract, present, and discuss original research results, policy, and technology developments related to personal data protection and privacy, aiming at promoting discussions, collaboration, and knowledge exchange on data protection and privacy.
Tech for Democracy
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November 9, 2021
Copenhagen, Denmark
The Danish Government will host an international conference, Tech for Democracy, to bring states, tech sector representatives, media, academia, and civil society around the same table to focus on concrete ways to make technology support – and not undermine – democracy and civil society.
Policy & AI
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November 9-10, 2021
Palo Alto, California, USA
With artificial intelligence rapidly transforming every aspect of our world, calls for regulation, governance, and oversight are on the rise. HAI’s 2021 fall conference will consider four radical proposals for policies that respond to the challenges and opportunities of an AI-powered future. Can basic income address the future of automated work? Should a public agency certify algorithms? How would we regulate AI-based decisions on platforms? Should there be ownership rights in data that fuel algorithms? Each substantive session will feature the short presentation of one radical proposal with discussion by a panel of experts from multiple disciplines and backgrounds.
ONGOING
Ada Lovelace Institute
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London’s Ada Lovelace Institute, founded in 2019 to ensure the ethical use of AI, is running a series of events on the issues surrounding the use of technologies in response to the pandemic. Late-2020 events included discussions of regulating for algorithm accountability and “almost-future” AI.
Bace Cybersecurity Institute
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Recent webinars sponsored by Bace Security include a “fireside” discussion with prominent women in security, security problems in online voting, methods for privacy-protecting digital contact tracing, advanced botnet researcher, and using marketing techniques to improve cybersecurity communication.
Benchmark Initiative
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The Benchmark Initiative is running regular events on topics such as the use of location data to end the global sanitation crisis, the safe use of location data in human migration; data, power, and the pandemic; and managing social distancing in public spaces. All events are posted on Vimeo soon after they conclude.
CAMRI
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The Communication and Media Institute (CAMRI) at London’s University of Westminster hosts a series of online events presenting the work of sociologists, historians, economists, and activists studying online developments around the world. Spring 2021 offerings include a reassessment of the 2010 Arab Spring and studies of internal communication connections within the Global South, the changing role of public service media, decolonizing the curriculum, and using Facebook to reduce polarization.
Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs
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The Carnegie Council runs frequent events on topics such as illiberal threats to democracy, the societal limits of AI ethics, AI and ethics in Africa, and inclusion. The Council posts audio and a transcript after each event.
Data & Society
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Data & Society has moved its weekly Databites and Network Power Hours programs into online interactive formats. Its first event for 2021 examines digital technology and democratic theory.
DRAILS
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The Research Group on Data, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Law & Society is presenting a series of discussions on topics such as robotics (Frank Pasquale, April 1), rights, technology, and society (Anne-Sophie Hulin, May 19), and justifiability and contestability of algorithmic decision systems (Daniel Le Métayer, June 1).
EFF
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EFF and its local counterparts in the Electronic Frontier Alliance are running numerous events on subjects such as technology education, open source, voting security, and content moderation.
Future in Review
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Future in Review is running a series of online “FiReSide” events. Recent topics include Chinese-US relations after the presidential election, and the future technology struggle.
Geneva Internet Platform
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The Geneva Internet Platform (GIP), a Swiss initiative run by DiploFoundation is organizing monthly briefings on internet governance, providing updates and news and projections of how they will influence future developments.
Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford
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HAI’s series of events covers AI-related topics such as upcoming regulation, issues with algorithms, health, and AI and society.
In Lieu of Fun
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Kate Klonick, an assistant professor at St John’s University School of Law who specializes in online speech and governance, and Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and co-founder and chief editor of Lawfare, hold a nightly discussion of current affairs, law, politics, and digital media with invited guests. Daily at 5pm Eastern Time.
Legal Frontiers in Digital Media 2020
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The Berkeley Center for Law and Technology‘s online seminars on emerging legal issues at the intersection of digital media, freedom of speech, and law include AI, privacy law, technology law as a vehicle for anti-racism, and a look ahead to the next telecommunications act.
London Futurists
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The London Futurists group, led by former Psion and Symbian architect David Wood, is presenting near-weekly speaker-led events focusing on potential radical transformations of humanity and society. Upcoming topics include anticipating future pandemics and a discussion of Michael Baxter’s new book, Living in the Age of the Jerk. Event recordings are made available soon after meetings conclude.
Open Data Institute
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The ODI’s Friday lunchtime (London time) talks have moved online. These one-hour talks cover topics such as data ethics, social equity, trust, and converting weather into music.
Open Rights Group
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The Open Rights Group and its local offshoots are running frequent online presentations and discussions of digital privacy, democracy, and data exploitation. Recent topics have included the launch of ORG’s data and democracy report, a proposed law to ensure that contact-tracing apps are surrounded with privacy-protecting safeguards, and the effect of the pandemic on democratic institutions.
Public Knowledge
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Public Knowledge is running public web events on subjects such as algorithmic amplification of hate speech, the survival of local journalism, and how to protect privacy during a pandemic.
RUSI
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London’s Royal United Services Institute is running frequent online events considering topics relating to international politics, terrorism, financial crime, policing, and warfare, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic and the changes it will bring.
Singularity University
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Singularity University‘s upcoming events include reimagining primary education and a series of executive programs aimed at various countries.
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