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NewsGuard Discovers AI-Driven Site from Lithuania Using AI to Spread Misinformation About U.S. Politics: “What could be better than getting your U.S. news from “reporting” produced by bots in Lithuania? What happened: NewsGuard has discovered a foreign-backed website using AI and fake followers on X to spread misinformation targeting Democrats after President Joe Biden’s withdrawal …
The Verge: “We’ve been living with social media for a long time now — Facebook opened up to the public in 2006 — and that means a lengthy trail of posts stretching back through the years. While this does let you take a nostalgic trip into the past with just a few clicks, it can …
Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons. July 2024. Data ProvenanceL General-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) systems are built on massive swathes of public web data, assembled into corpora such as C4, RefinedWeb, and Dolma. “To our knowledge, we conduct the first, large-scale, longitudinal audit of the consent protocols for the web …
Harvard Business Review: “Today the workforce is getting older, and the number of younger workers in positions of senior management is growing. These two developments might appear to spell trouble, in that they seem to set the generations against one another, but the author of this article argues that in fact they represent an important …
The American Bar Association’s Task Force on Law and Artificial Intelligence released a report today titled “Year I Report on the Impact of AI on the Practice of Law” that details the work of the group over the past year. The AI Task Force, created in August 2023 by ABA President Mary Smith, brought together …
The New York Times [unpaywalled]: “Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, a federal judge ruled on Monday, a landmark decision that strikes at the power of tech giants in the modern internet era and that may fundamentally alter the way they do business. Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court …
EFF: “Last month’s unprecedented global IT failure should be a wakeup call. Decades of antitrust inaction have made many industries dangerously reliant on the same tools, making such crises inevitable. We must demand regulators break up the digital monocultures that are creating a less competitive, less safe, and less free digital world. The Federal Trade …
Washington Post via Yahoo: “…Apple deserves credit for making many privacy protections automatic with Safari, which you probably use to browse the web if you have an iPhone, Mac computer or iPad. But Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said Safari is no better than the fourth-best web browser for …
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, August 2, 2024 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex …
Silicon Folklore – The History of the Narrative History of the Internet: “You’ve probably heard the story of how the Internet was designed to withstand a nuclear attack. It usually goes “DARPA was doing cold war planning and was eager for a distributed resilient command-and-control”… actually let’s hear Professor Rob Larson, author of Bit Tyrants: …
The Register: “Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides “field service management” that allows customers to monitor mobile service workers through smartphone apps – allegedly to the detriment of their autonomy and dignity. According to a probe by Cracked Labs – an Austrian nonprofit research group – the software is part of a broader set of applications that …
NiemanLabs – From loading up the Wayback Machine to meticulous AirTables to 72 hours of scraping, journalists are doing whatever they can to keep their clips when websites go dark: “When news sites shut down, those sites’ owners often don’t prioritize the preservation of the content. MTV pulled down MTV News in June. After Deadspin …
