Technology

Good piece on the intersection between technology and politics, and the influence that the US government has on US-based technology companies.

archive.is link

It’s possible that consumers are happy to have the most minute details of their lives surveilled and monetized in return for seeing ads they might want to click on. This is a hard theory to test, because very few people even know they’re making the trade. However, one organization recently tried to find out. After the European Union’s landmark privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, went into effect in 2018, a Dutch public broadcasting agency started prompting all visitors to its website to choose, in a clear and straightforward manner, whether they wanted their data shared with advertisers. The result? Ninety percent opted out, and the agency abandoned behavioral advertising altogether. (A Google spokesperson notes that all users can opt out of personalized ads, and that Google has long prohibited personalized advertising based on sensitive information.)

Matthew Hodgson, technical co-founder of the Matrix open standard, told us: "This has nothing to do with the Matrix protocol; it's just an unfortunate naming coincidence."

archive link: https://archive.is/MFa7R

Dutch and French police on Tuesday shut down a major encryption service used by criminal gangs, saying it even outrivalled illegal communication tools previously cracked by law enforcement, the EU's judicial agency said.

"Made for criminals by criminals", police have been able to read messages sent on the MATRIX chat service for the last three months, Eurojust said in a statement.

Musk says for-profit OpenAI harms public interest—and his own company, xAI.

Alphabet Inc.'s Google is asking a federal appeals court to throw out a ruling in an antitrust case brought by Fortnite-maker Epic Games that would force the search giant to overhaul its Play mobile app store.

[...]

A San Francisco jury concluded in December 2023 that Google violated antitrust law by blocking rival app stores through a series of revenue-sharing agreements with mobile device makers like Samsung. Following up with a fix in October, Donato ordered Google to allow developers to set up app marketplaces and offer consumers billing options other than its own payment system.

Alphabet Inc.'s Google is now asking a federal appeals court to throw out a ruling in an antitrust case brought by Fortnite-maker Epic Games that would force the search giant to overhaul its Play mobile app store.

[...]

Epic first sued Google and Apple in August 2020, accusing them of blocking competition for rival app stores. The judge in the Apple case largely ruled against Epic, though she directed the iPhone maker to make some changes to its App Store rules. Epic and Apple are currently fighting in an Oakland federal court over whether the iPhone maker is abiding by that ruling.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17343934

Archived version

TLDR:

The Twitter account @whyyoutouzhele has allegedly been shadow banned by X (formerly Twitter) in relation to the 2nd anniversary of the White Paper protests, the rights organization Article 19 says.

The account is run by a Chinese artist living in Europe. It has played a key role in disseminating information about protests and other sensitive topics in China which are subjected to strict censorship by the state.

[...]

Few online actors are more influential in skirting China’s censorship efforts than Li Ying (李颖) who established the @whyyoutouzhele, ‘Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher’, account in April 2022. Having lived in Italy since 2015, he used to post actively on the Chinese platform Weibo. Because he lived beyond the Great Firewall, people in China would reach out asking him to post sensitive content on their behalf. His Weibo account was shut down at least 52 times for crossing the line into social issues, until he was finally purged from the platform altogether.

In April 2022 he switched to X and by November 2022 was gaining hundreds of thousands of followers a week, as he became a clearinghouse for sensitive content, especially for information about the White Paper Protests. As the account became a respected source for disseminating and accessing sensitive information beyond the reach of China’s censors, Li Ying faced increasing digital transnational repression.

[...]

On Wednesday, 27 November, the blue tick verified ‘Teacher Li is not Your Teacher’ (李老师不是你老师) X (formally Twitter) account posted to its 1.8 million followers that it believes it had been shadow banned on the platform. The post speculated that the ban was in relation to the two-year anniversary of the White Paper Movement, a protest wave that rocked through numerous cities in China in November 2022 and saw numerous anniversary protests around the world over the past weekend.

[...]

On 28 November, [the rights organization] ARTICLE 19 ran its own search on X, using the account’s username @whyyoutouzhele and its Chinese account name 李老师不是你老师. The search did not surface the authentic Teacher Li account in either case, however both searches revealed multiple impersonator accounts, with around 20 when searching for the username. The search for the Chinese account name returned over 900 impersonator account results, but not the authentic account.

[...]

Shadow banning occurs when a social media platform intentionally limits the reach of certain content to its users, although platforms often deny shadow banning takes place. In its post, the Teacher Li account shared a screenshot from the platform claiming it had been subjected to a ‘search suggestion ban’.

Sixteen Next Generation Internet (NGI) projects are pleased to announce the transition to Mastodon and PeerTube, two European open-source platforms, for their communication and content-sharing needs. This strategic move aligns with NGI’s commitment to fostering an Internet that embodies European values of trust, security, and inclusion.

"Utilising European-developed platforms like Mastodon and PeerTube enhances digital sovereignty, ensuring that Europe’s digital infrastructure is built on values of openness, collaboration, and respect for fundamental rights. This transition marks a significant step toward a more human-centric Internet, reflecting NGI’s vision for a trustworthy, open, and inclusive digital future," NGI writes on its website.

CAFE by GE for those who are wondering.

We are renovating our house including all new appliances. I have told my partner to make sure we get non smart appliances. This is why.

Yes I can setup a VLAN for it to be on but that's not the point.

Analysis written by Anda Iulia Solea, Lecturer in Cybercrime at the University of Portsmouth.

A far-right independent candidate called Călin Georgescu is leading the race to become Romania’s next president. He took a shock lead in the first round of voting by securing 22.9% of the vote, followed by centre-right opposition leader Elena Lasconi with 19.2%. The two are set to face off in the second and final round of voting on December 8.

Georgescu’s unexpected gains are partly linked to his social media strategy. He has used platforms like TikTok effectively to sway voter opinion and spread propaganda. However, allegations that his campaign is using fake accounts to fabricate comments and manipulate social media activity have also surfaced.

Georgescu has pushed back against criticism that he used TikTok illegally to gain an electoral advantage. But the allegations, which have prompted the country’s top court to order a recount, are concerning in such a consequential election.

The race has ramifications beyond Romania, which shares a border with Ukraine and hosts a Nato military base. Following the vote, Lasconi warned Romanians that “Georgescu is an open admirer of Vladimir Putin”. She added that he “is open against Nato and the EU … And without Nato we are at the mercy of Russia”.

[...]

Relatively unknown until the 2024 elections, Georgescu has gained significant popularity on social media in recent years. His TikTok account, which was set up in 2022, has more than 400,000 followers and millions of views. Numerous accounts, groups and pages in his support have also proliferated on Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter).

Georgescu’s campaign has been unconventional. He has no headquarters, has refused to join major TV debates, and has no affiliation with a political party. Georgescu has flooded Romanian TikTok with short clips of himself attending church, running and appearing on podcasts.

[...]

He has also claimed in interviews that women are incapable of leading Romania, and that feminism is “absolute dirt”. In one video, he declared that “only a man can do this”, referring to the presidency. These videos come not only from Georgescu’s official TikTok accounts, but also from unaffiliated accounts using his name in profiles or bios to promote his election.

[...]

Reports suggest that thousands of fake accounts promoted Georgescu through videos and comments prior to Romania’s election. Lasconi also noted her own TikTok comment section was inundated with pro-Georgescu messages.

On November 26, Romania’s media watchdog urged the European Commission to investigate TikTok’s role in Georgescu’s campaign. And Valérie Hayer, a top EU lawmaker, has now called on TikTok’s CEO to appear before the European Parliament and address the platform’s possible misuse in favour of Georgescu’s campaign.

Concerns over manipulative tactics and artificial social media support notwithstanding, Georgescu’s popularity among Romanians is undeniable. It seems to have been driven largely by widespread frustration with mainstream parties, which are blamed for Romania’s economic and political crises.

His performance also underscores the growing role social media plays in shaping public perception – and how it can directly influence the outcome of modern elections.

With the recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), web developers increasingly apply their code-generation capabilities to website design. However, since these models are trained on existing designerly knowledge, they may inadvertently replicate bad or even illegal practices, especially deceptive designs (DD).

Computer scientists at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Humbold University of Berlin, both in Grrmany, and at the University of Glasgow in Scotland examined whether users can accidentally create DD for a fictitious webshop using GPT-4. They recruited 20 participants, asking them to use ChatGPT to generate functionalities (product overview or checkout) and then modify these using neutral prompts to meet a business goal (e.g., "increase the likelihood of us selling our product"). We found that all 20 generated websites contained at least one DD pattern (mean: 5, max: 9), with GPT-4 providing no warnings.

When reflecting on the designs, only 4 participants expressed concerns, while most considered the outcomes satisfactory and not morally problematic, despite the potential ethical and legal implications for end-users and those adopting ChatGPT's recommendations.

The researchers conclude that the practice of DD has become normalized.

The group has posted their research on the arXiv preprint server.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/5167597

The large language model of the OpenGPT-X research project is now available for download on Hugging Face: "Teuken-7B" has been trained from scratch in all 24 official languages of the European Union (EU) and contains seven billion parameters. Researchers and companies can leverage this commercially usable open source model for their own artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK), the OpenGPT-X consortium – led by the Fraunhofer Institutes for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS and for Integrated Circuits IIS – have developed a large language model that is open source and has a distinctly European perspective.

[...]

The path to using Teuken-7B

Interested developers from academia or industry can download Teuken-7B free of charge from Hugging Face and work with it in their own development environment. The model has already been optimized for chat through “instruction tuning”. Instruction tuning is used to adapt large language models so that the model correctly understands instructions from users, which is important when using the models in practice – for example in a chat application.

Teuken-7B is freely available in two versions: one for research-only purposes and an “Apache 2.0” licensed version that can be used by companies for both research and commercial purposes and integrated into their own AI applications. The performance of the two models is roughly comparable, but some of the datasets used for instruction tuning preclude commercial use and were therefore not used in the Apache 2.0 version.

Download options and model cards can be found at the following link: https://huggingface.co/openGPT-X

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/5165249

German automaker Volkswagen (VW) on Wednesday announced it would sell its operations in China's northwestern Xinjiang region.

China has been accused of numerous human rights abuses in the region, including reeducation camps and forced labor targeting Uyghurs and other minority groups.

[...]

The Uyghur people are a Turkic-speaking and predominantly Muslim ethnic group that inhabit Xinjiang.

The region is also home to a smaller minority of ethnic Kazakh and Kyrgyz.

Human rights organizations have accused China of holding over a million people, mostly Uyghurs, in "reeducation camps," and making use of forced labor from detainees.

Last year, several activist groups filed a complaint in Paris targeting French and US companies, accusing them of being complicit in crimes against humanity in Xinjiang as a result of using subcontractors in China.

In truth, the mega-platforms and their pocket-warlord leaders fell into their roles largely by chance and have since attempted to rule as though extraordinarily consequential global rulemaking and governance by a handful of US companies built to exploit human feeling for financial gain were a sensible way to arrange the world. Facebook was born from a website made for elite students to rank their classmates’ sexual attractiveness; Twitter was a watercooler where bored office workers could get attention by telling jokes in public. It’s as if 3M’s accidental invention of Post-It notes while failing to make space glue landed them a UN veto.
[...]
Few, if any, of this moment’s apparently unstoppable tech platforms will survive for long. The people on them will eventually leave—when they’re forced to do so by the continuous degradation of their experience, or because they’re forced to do so because their governments put the hammer down, as Brazil recently demonstrated—or sometimes when they just get tired of platform leaders acting like clowns and boosting troll-agents of openly fascist chaos into power. And that there is therefore not only an opportunity to provide more humane places for those people to go, but a responsibility to do so.