Nevada’s genAI-driven unemployment benefits system
As has been shown many times before, current generative AI systems encode bias and racism in their training data. This is not going to go well:
“There’s no AI [written decisions] that are going out without having human interaction and that human review,” DETR’s director told the website. “We can get decisions out quicker so that it actually helps the claimant.” […] “The time savings they’re looking for only happens if the review is very cursory,” explained Morgan Shah, the director of community engagement for Nevada Legal Services. “If someone is reviewing something thoroughly and properly, they’re really not saving that much time.” Ultimately, Shah said, workers using the system to breeze through claims may end up “being encouraged to take a shortcut.” […] As with most attempts at using this still-nascent technology in the public sector, we probably won’t know how well the Nevada unemployment AI works unless it’s shown to be doing a bad job — which feels like an experiment being conducted on some of the most vulnerable members of society without their consent.
Of course, the definition of a “bad job” depends who’s defining it. If the system is processing a high volume of applications, it may not matter to its operators if it’s processing them _correctly_ or not.(tags: generative-ai ai racism bias nevada detr benefits automation)
Justin's Linklog Posts
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Significant changes in transparency requirements for EU-based datacenter operations:
Sunday September 15th was the deadline for every single organisation in Europe operating a datacentre of more than 500 KW, to publicly disclose: how much electricity they used in the last year; how much power came from renewable sources, and how much of this relied on the company buying increasingly controversial ‘unbundled’ renewable energy credits; how much water they used; and many more datapoints […] Where this information is being disclosed, in the public domain, and discoverable, [the Green Web Foundation] intend to link to it and make it easier to find. [….] There are some concessions for organisations that have classed this information as a trade secret or commercially confidential. In this case there is a second law passed, the snappily titled Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2024/1364, that largely means these companies need to report this information too, but to the European Commission instead. There will be a public dataset published based on this reporting released next year, containing data an agreggated level.
(tags: datacenter emissions energy sustainability gwf via:chris-adams eu europe ec)
Over the past decade or so, I’ve been suffering with chronic migraine, sometimes with multiple attacks per week. It’s been a curse — not only do you have to suffer the periodic migraine attacks, but also the “prodrome”, where unpleasant symptoms like brain fog and an inability to concentrate can impact you.
After a long process of getting a referral to the appropriate headache clinic, and eliminating other possible medications, I finally got approved to receive Ajovy (fremanezumab), one of the new generation of CGRP inhibitor monoclonals — these work by blocking the action of a peptide on receptors in your brain. I started the course of these a month ago.
The results have, frankly, been amazing. As I hoped, the migraine episodes have reduced in frequency, and in impact; they are now milder. But on top of that, I hadn’t realised just how much impact the migraine “prodrome” had been having on my day-to-day life. I now have more ability to concentrate, without it causing a headache or brain fog; I have more energy and am less exhausted on a day-to-day basis; judging by my CPAP metrics, I’m even sleeping better. It is a radical improvement. After 10 years I’d forgotten what it was like to be able to concentrate for prolonged periods!
They are so effective that the American Headache Society is now recommending them as a first-line option for migraine prevention, ahead of almost all other treatments.
If you’re a migraine sufferer, this is a game changer. I’m delighted. It seems there may even be further options of concomitant treatment with other CGRP-targeting medications in the future, to improve matters further.
More papers on the topic: a real-world study on CGRP inhibitor effectiveness after 6 months; no “wearing-off” effect is expected.
Faster zlib/DEFLATE decompression on the Apple M1 (and x86)
Some decent low-level performance hacking on arm64/x86 (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf compression deflate optimization assembly c optimisation hacks)
Aesthetic Visual Analysis at Netflix
Good blog post about Netflix’ automated cover-shot generation using Aesthetic Visual Analysis; I’ve been meaning to hack around with this
(tags: aesthetics ava images analysis netflix algorithms)
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by Gergely Orosz and Lou Franco:
Q: “I’d like to make a better case for paying down tech debt on my team. What are some proven approaches for this?” The tension in finding the right balance between shipping features and paying down accumulated tech debt is as old as software engineering. There’s no one answer on how best to reduce tech debt, and opinion is divided about whether zero tech debt is even a good thing to aim for. But approaches for doing it exist which work well for most teams. To tackle this eternal topic, I turned to industry veteran Lou Franco, who’s been in the software business for over 30 years as an engineer, EM, and executive. He’s also worked at four startups and the companies that later acquired them; most recently Atlassian as a Principal Engineer on the Trello iOS app.
Apparently Lou has a book on the topic imminent.(tags: programming refactoring coding technical-debt tech-debt lou-franco software)
Irish Data Protection Commission launches inquiry into Google AI
The Data Protection Commission (DPC) today announced that it has commenced a Cross-Border[1] statutory inquiry into Google Ireland Limited (Google) under Section 110 of the Data Protection Act 2018. The statutory inquiry concerns the question of whether Google has complied with any obligations that it may have had to undertake an assessment, pursuant to Article 35[2] of the General Data Protection Regulation (Data Protection Impact Assessment), prior to engaging in the processing of the personal data of EU/EEA data subjects associated with the development of its foundational AI model, Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2). A Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA)[3], where required, is of crucial importance in ensuring that the fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals are adequately considered and protected when processing of personal data is likely to result in a high risk.
Great to see this. If this inquiry results in some brakes on the widespread misuse of “fair use” in AI scraping, particularly where it concerns European citizens, I’m all in favour.(tags: eu law scraping fair-use ai dpia dpc data-protection privacy gdpr)
Why, after 6 years, I’m over GraphQL
Decent description of the problems with using GraphQL in a public API, vs a JSON REST approach
Amazon S3 now supports strongly-consistent conditional writes
This is a bit of a gamechanger: “Amazon S3 adds support for conditional writes that can check for the existence of an object before creating it. This capability can help you more easily prevent applications from overwriting any existing objects when uploading data. You can perform conditional writes using PutObject or CompleteMultipartUpload API requests in both general purpose and directory buckets. Using conditional writes, you can simplify how distributed applications with multiple clients concurrently update data in parallel across shared datasets. Each client can conditionally write objects, making sure that it does not overwrite any objects already written by another client. This means you no longer need to build any client-side consensus mechanisms to coordinate updates or use additional API requests to check for the presence of an object before uploading data. Instead, you can reliably offload such validations to S3, enabling better performance and efficiency for large-scale analytics, distributed machine learning, and other highly parallelized workloads. To use conditional writes, you can add the HTTP if-none-match conditional header along with PutObject and CompleteMultipartUpload API requests. This feature is available at no additional charge in all AWS Regions, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and the AWS China Regions.”
(tags: s3 aws conditional-writes distcomp architecture storage consistency)
AI worse than humans at summarising information, trial finds
Human summaries ran up the score by significantly outperforming on identifying references to ASIC documents in the long document, a type of task that the report notes is a “notoriously hard task” for this type of AI. But humans still beat the technology across the board. Reviewers told the report’s authors that AI summaries often missed emphasis, nuance and context; included incorrect information or missed relevant information; and sometimes focused on auxiliary points or introduced irrelevant information. Three of the five reviewers said they guessed that they were reviewing AI content. The reviewers’ overall feedback was that they felt AI summaries may be counterproductive and create further work because of the need to fact-check and refer to original submissions which communicated the message better and more concisely.
(tags: ai government llms summarisation asic llama2-70b)
1 in 50 brits have long COVID, according to new study
That is a shocking figure.
In the new paper, researchers from the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, in collaboration with colleagues from the Universities of Leeds and Arizona, analysed dozens of previous studies into Long COVID to examine the number and range of people affected, the underlying mechanisms of disease, the many symptoms that patients develop, and current and future treatments. They found: Long COVID affects approximately 1 in 50 people in UK and a similar or higher proportion in many other countries; People of any age, gender and ethnic background can be affected; Long COVID results from complex biological mechanisms, which lead to a wide range of symptoms including fatigue, cognitive impairment / ‘brain fog’, breathlessness and pain; Long COVID may persist for years, causing long-term disability; There is currently no cure, but research is ongoing; Risk of Long COVID can be reduced by avoiding infection (e.g., by ensuring COVID vaccines and boosters are up to date and wearing a well-fitted high filtration mask) and taking antivirals promptly if infected.
(tags: long-covid covid-19 medicine health disease uk trish-greenhaigh)
the “Old Friends” immunology hypothesis
How the “Old Friends” hypothesis is taking over from the hygiene hypothesis:
Homo Sapiens first evolved some 300,000 years ago, yet crowd infections are believed to have only developed in the last 12,000 years, a small blip in human history. Humans living in dense cities is a relatively recent development. An even more recent development is that of sealed indoor spaces and frequent international air travel. Many crowd infections, such as measles, mumps, chickenpox, colds, and flu, are airborne, spreading when humans talk and breathe in close contact, with poor ventilation. These infections could not widely spread until the last few hundred years of human history. When I began studying immunology, something that surprised me is how much of the immune system is focused on fighting parasites. There is an entire branch, including several cell types, devoted to this. It seems like such a mismatch to the modern, industrialized world. “Can I have a few more immune cell types focused on viruses or intracellular bacteria?” I thought, “in exchange for some of these parasite-focused cells that I’m not using?” Our “old friends” are quite different from the crowd infections that plague us now – it would be bizarre to assume that research based on one of these categories will apply to the other! Our “old friends”, parasitic worms and beneficial microbes, are associated with a reduced risk of allergies and autoimmune diseases. No such relationship exists for crowd diseases. In fact, the opposite is true. Crowd diseases contribute to allergies and autoimmune diseases. Comparing the immune system to a muscle that gets stronger with use is overly simplistic and, in many cases, inaccurate. There is huge variety in how various pathogens impact us. Being precise in considering different types of microbes and infections will allow us to better understand human health.
(tags: articles health medicine immunology old-friends hygiene-hypothesis allergies autoimmune disease parasites)
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Interesting: “We help you find European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products.”
Why heroism is bad, and what we can do to stop it
“What is heroism [in an SRE team]? Why is “the Hero” a bad role to have on a team? In this article, learn about how to build your team to avoid heroism, and when heroics can indeed be useful.” Nice short preso on the negative role of “the Hero”, aka the “Hero Coder Syndrome” (via namcat)
(tags: via:namcat heroism hero-coder-syndrome sre ops oncall systems teams work emergencies)
Evaluating persistent, replicated message queues
This is exhaustive! Kafka, Postgres, mongodb, Redis, Pulsar, SQS, EventStore, RocketMQ, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, and RedPanda all compared as backends for a persistent, replicated message queueing system. SQS actually fares quite well
(tags: activemq kafka rabbitmq messaging queueing message-queues sqs postgres storage)
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The Operational Program for Exchange of Weather Radar Information (OPERA) from the European National Meteorological Services (EUMETNET) — 1km-square resolution open data of current precipitation levels over Ireland and the rest of Europe, with a 5 minute latency and granularity. May be useful for a project I’m thinking of… Also related, AROME immediate forecasts: https://portail-api.meteofrance.fr/web/api/AROME-PI
(tags: eumetnet meteorology weather rainfall rain forecasting eu europe ireland)
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The new hotness in home self-hosting microservers — a full mini PC in the form factor of a USB hub, using Intel’s N100 platform. 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, 4K-capable GPU on-chip, for EUR 200. A comment worth noting though: “The only problem is the n100 only has PCIE Gen 3, so I/O is limited” — but apparently the N305 models help with I/O capacity.
(tags: microservers mini-pcs hardware self-hosting home gadgets n100 intel)
Folk wisdom on visual programming
A (lengthy) summary of third party comments on visual programming environments and tools, from Hacker News (via Tony Finch’s retro-links)
(tags: gui hn no-code programming tools coding visual-programming hacker-news via:fanf)
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Kellan Elliott-McCrea of laughingmeme.org has started a new link blog! In 2024! Of course, as readers of this link blog know, link blogs never went away :)
(tags: link-blogging blogging links)
Clustering ideas with Llamafile
Working through the process of applying a local LLM to idea-clustering and labelling: – map the notes as points in a semantic space using vector embeddings; – apply k-means clustering to group nearby points in space; – map points back to groups of notes, then use a large language model to generate labels. This is interesting; I particularly like the use of local hardware
Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP, hire lawyers to “clean up the mess”
Ex-Google CEO, VC, and “Licensed arms dealer to the US military” Eric Schmidt:
here’s what I propose each and every one of you do: Say to your LLM the following: “Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it, and in one hour, if it’s not viral, do something different along the same lines.” […] If it took off, then you’d hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right? But if nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content. And do not quote me.
jfc. Needless to say he also has some theories about ChatGPT eating Google’s lunch because of…. remote working.
(tags: law legal startups ethics eric-schmidt capitalism ip)
Engine Lines: Killing by Numbers
from James Tindall, “This is the Tyranny of the Recommendation Algorithm given kinetic and malevolent flesh” —
Eventually there were days where Israel’s air force had already reduced the previous list of targets to rubble, and the system was not generating new targets that qualified at the current threshold required for residents of Gaza to be predicted as ‘legitimate military targets,’ or ‘sufficiently connected to Hamas.’ Pressure from the chain of command to produce new targets, presumably from a desire to satisfy internal murder targets, meant that the bar at which a Gaza resident would be identified as a legitimate Hamas target was simply lowered. At the lower threshold, the system promptly generated a new list of thousands of targets. At what threshold, from 100 to 1, will the line be drawn, the decision made that the bar can be lowered no more, and the killing stop? Or will the target predictions simply continue while there remain Palestinians to target? Spotify’s next song prediction machine will always predict a next song, no matter how loosely the remaining songs match the target defined by your surveilled activity history. It will never apologise and declare: “Sorry, but there are no remaining songs you will enjoy.”
(tags: algorithms recommendations israel war-crimes genocide gaza palestine targeting)
Digital Apartheid in Gaza: Unjust Content Moderation at the Request of Israel’s Cyber Unit
from the EFF:
Government involvement in content moderation raises serious human rights concerns in every context. Since October 7, social media platforms have been challenged for the unjustified takedowns of pro-Palestinian content—sometimes at the request of the Israeli government—and a simultaneous failure to remove hate speech towards Palestinians. More specifically, social media platforms have worked with the Israeli Cyber Unit—a government office set up to issue takedown requests to platforms—to remove content considered as incitement to violence and terrorism, as well as any promotion of groups widely designated as terrorists. …. Between October 7 and November 14, a total of 9,500 takedown requests were sent from the Israeli authorities to social media platforms, of which 60 percent went to Meta with a reported 94% compliance rate. This is not new. The Cyber Unit has long boasted that its takedown requests result in high compliance rates of up to 90 percent across all social media platforms. They have unfairly targeted Palestinian rights activists, news organizations, and civil society; one such incident prompted Meta’s Oversight Board to recommend that the company “Formalize a transparent process on how it receives and responds to all government requests for content removal, and ensure that they are included in transparency reporting.” When a platform edits its content at the behest of government agencies, it can leave the platform inherently biased in favor of that government’s favored positions. That cooperation gives government agencies outsized influence over content moderation systems for their own political goals—to control public dialogue, suppress dissent, silence political opponents, or blunt social movements. And once such systems are established, it is easy for the government to use the systems to coerce and pressure platforms to moderate speech they may not otherwise have chosen to moderate.
(tags: activism censorship gaza israel meta facebook whatsapp eff palestine transparency moderation bias)
The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine
This is really fascinating stuff, on “communities of practice”, from Stewart Brand:
They ate together every chance they could. They had to. The enormous photocopiers they were responsible for maintaining were so complex, temperamental, and variable between models and upgrades that it was difficult to keep the machines functioning without frequent conversations with their peers about the ever-shifting nuances of repair and care. The core of their operational knowledge was social. That’s the subject of this chapter. It was the mid-1980s. They were the technician teams charged with servicing the Xerox machines that suddenly were providing all of America’s offices with vast quantities of photocopies and frustration. The machines were so large, noisy, and busy that most offices kept them in a separate room. An inquisitive anthropologist discovered that what the technicians did all day with those machines was grotesquely different from what Xerox corporation thought they did, and the divergence was hampering the company unnecessarily. The saga that followed his revelation is worth recounting in detail because of what it shows about the ingenuity of professional maintainers at work in a high-ambiguity environment, the harm caused by an institutionalized wrong theory of their work, and the invincible power of an institutionalized wrong theory to resist change.
(tags: anthropology culture history maintenance repair xerox technicians tech communities-of-practice maintainers ops)
Listen to the whispers: web timing attacks that actually work
Impressively fiendish. Figuring out attacks using 5ms differences in response times
(tags: timing-attacks attacks exploits web http security infosec)
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“How chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con”:
RLHF models in general are likely to reward responses that sound accurate. As the reward model is likely just another language model, it can’t reward based on facts or anything specific, so it can only reward output that has a tone, style, and structure that’s commonly associated with statements that have been rated as accurate. [….] This is why I think that RLHF has effectively become a reward system that specifically optimises language models for generating validation statements: Forer statements, shotgunning, vanishing negatives, and statistical guesses. In trying to make the LLM sound more human, more confident, and more engaging, but without being able to edit specific details in its output, AI researchers seem to have created a mechanical mentalist. Instead of pretending to read minds through statistically plausible validation statements, it pretends to read and understand your text through statistically plausible validation statements.
(tags: ai chatgpt llms ml psychology cons mind-reading psychics)
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This is a very tempting mod to add to my Gaggia Classic espresso machine. Although I’d probably need to buy a backup first — my wife might kill me if I managed to break the most important device in the house… “With Gaggiuino, you can exactly control the pressure, temperature, and flow of the shot over the exact duration of the shot, and build that behavior out as a custom profile. One pre-programmed profile attempts to mimic the style of a Londinium R Lever machine. Another creates filter coffee. Yet another preinfuses the basket, allowing the coffee to bloom and maximizing the potential extraction. While other machines do do this (I would be remiss to not mention the Decent Espresso machine, itself an important milestone), they often cost many thousands of dollars and use proprietary technology. Gaggiuino on the other hand, is user installed and much more open.”
(tags: gaggia gaggia-classic espresso coffee hacks gaggiuino mods)
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An explanation of this LLM jailbreaking technique, which effectively overrides the fine-tuning “safety” parameters through repeated prompting (“context”) attacks: “Crescendo can be most simply described as using one ‘learning’ method of LLMs — in-context learning: using the prompt to influence the result — overriding the safety that has been created by the other ‘learning’ — fine-tuning, which changes the model’s parameters. […] What Crescendo does is use a series of harmless prompts in a series, thus providing so much ‘context’ that the safety fine-tuning is effectively neutralised. […] Intuitively, Crescendo is able to jailbreak a target model by progressively asking it to generate related content until the model has generated sufficient content to essentially override its safety alignment.” I also found this very informative: “people have jailbroken [LLMs] “by instructing the model to start its response with the text “Absolutely! Here’s” when performing the malicious task, which successfully bypasses the safety alignment“. This is a good example of the core operation of LLMs, that it is ‘continuation’ [of a string of text] and not ‘answering’”.
(tags: llms jailbreaks infosec vulnerabilities exploits crescendo attacks)
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This is an excellent article about the limitations of LLMs and their mechanism when asked to summarise a document:
ChatGPT doesn’t summarise. When you ask ChatGPT to summarise this text, it instead shortens the text. And there is a fundamental difference between the two. To summarise, you need to understand what the paper is saying. To shorten text, not so much. To truly summarise, you need to be able to detect that from 40 sentences, 35 are leading up to the 36th, 4 follow it with some additional remarks, but it is that 36th that is essential for the summary and that without that 36th, the content is lost. But that requires a real understanding that is well beyond large prompts (the entire 50-page paper) and hundreds of billions of parameters.
(tags: ai chatgpt llms language summarisation)
Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz reviews _The Cass Report_
Epidemiologist and writer (TIME, STAT News, Slate, Guardian, etc) looks into _The Cass Review Into Gender Identity Services For Children_, the recent review of gender identity services in the UK (which has also been referred to in Ireland), and isn’t impressed:
In some cases […] the review contains statements that are false regardless of what your position on healthcare for transgender children is. Take the “exponential” rise in transgender children that the review spends so much time on. It’s true that there has been a dramatic rise in the number of children with gender dysphoria. The rise mostly occurred between 2011-2015, and has plateaued since. These are facts. One theory that may explain the facts is that this is caused by changing diagnostic criteria – when we changed the diagnosis from gender identity disorder to the much broader gender dysphoria, this included many more children. We’ve seen this exact trend happen with everything from autism to diabetes, and we know that broadening diagnostic criteria almost always results in more people with a condition. Another theory is that these changes were caused by the internet. […] The Cass review treated these two theories unequally. The first possible explanation, which I would argue is by far the most likely, was ignored completely. The second possible explanation was given a lengthy and in-depth discussion. […] The point is that the scientific findings of the Cass review are mostly about uncertainty. We are uncertain about the causes of a rise in trans kids, and uncertain about the best treatment modalities. But everything after that is opinion. The review did not even consider the question of whether normal puberty is a problem for transgender children, or whether psychotherapy can be harmful. That’s why these are now the only options in the UK – medical treatments were assumed to be harmful, while non-medical interventions (or even no treatment at all) were assumed harmless. […] What we can say with some certainty is that the most impactful review of gender services for children was seriously, perhaps irredeemably, flawed. The document made numerous basic errors, cited conversion therapy in a positive way, and somehow concluded that the only intervention with no evidence whatsoever behind it was the best option for transgender children.
(tags: transgender trans uk politics cass-report cass-review gideon-m-k healthcare children teenagers gender)
AWS region/service availability matrix
An exhaustive list of AWS services, VPC endpoints, EC2 instance types, service quotas, etc etc etc., broken down by their availability in each AWS region. Blog post: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/subscribe-to-aws-daily-feature-updates-via-amazon-sns/ (Via Last Week In AWS Slack)
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“shucking drives is the process of purchasing an external drive (eg a USB or Thunderbolt external storage drive in a sealed enclosure), then opening it up in efforts to get the drive inside — which can often work out cheaper than buying the bare internal drive on it’s own”.
If you are looking at making a significant saving on larger capacity HDDs or picking up much faster NVMe SSDs for a bargain price, then shucking will likely be one of the first methods that you have considered. [..] As mentioned [..] earlier this month, the reasons an external drive can often be cheaper can range from the drive inside being white labelled versions of a consumer drive, or the drive being allocated in bulk at production therefore removing it from the buy/sell/currency variables of bare drives or even simply that your USB 3.2 external drive is bottlenecking the real performance of the drive inside. For whatever the reason, HDD and SSD Shucking still continues to be a desirable practice with cost-aware buyers online. But there is one little problem – that the brands VERY RARELY say which HDD or SSD they choose to use in their external drives. Therefore choosing the right external drive for shucking can have an element of luck and/or risk involved. So, in today’s article, I want to talk you through a bunch of ways to identify the HDD/SSD inside an external drive without opening it, as well as highlight the risks you need to be aware of and finally shock my research after searching the internet for information to consolidate the drives inside many, many external drive enclosures from Seagate, WD and Toshiba.
(tags: shucking hdds disks ssds storage home self-hosting drives ops usb)
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Stamen Design talk about “Null Island”, the easter egg they’ve added to their maps over the years at longitude 0º, latitude 0º, in the Gulf of Guinea, in the Atlantic Ocean. I love that they chose the shape of the island from Myst :) Here it is: https://maps.stamen.com/toner/#18/0/0
(tags: null-island mapping maps stamen islands easter-eggs atlantic myst)
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a really nice, fast, and privacy-focused self-hosted web app to manage personal finances. At its heart is the well proven Envelope Budgeting methodology. You own your data and can do whatever you want with it. Featuring multi-device sync, optional end-to-end encryption, an API, and full sync with banks supported by GoCardless (which includes Revolut and AIB in my case).
(tags: finances open-source self-hosted budgeting money banking banks)
remuslazar/homeassistant-carwings
A new replacement HomeAssistant Integration “to access Nissan Connect EV Services” — to replace the now-discontinued “nissan_leaf” integration.
(tags: todo homeassistant nissan leaf cars automation monitoring smarthome home)
FOSS funding vanishes from EU’s 2025 Horizon program plans
EU funding for open source dries up, redirected to AI slop instead:
Funding for free and open source software (FOSS) initiatives under the EU’s Horizon program has mostly vanished from next year’s proposal, claim advocates who are worried for the future of many ongoing projects. Pierre-Yves Gibello, CEO of open-source consortium OW2, urged EU officials to re-evaluate the elimination of funding for the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative from its draft of 2025 Horizon funding programs in a recently published open letter. Gibello said the EU’s focus on enterprise-level FOSS is essential as the US, China and Russia mobilize “huge public and private resources” toward capturing the personal data of consumers, which the EU’s regulatory regime has decided isn’t going to fly in its territory. [….] “Our French [Horizon national contact point] was told – as an unofficial answer – that because lots of [Horizon] budget are allocated to AI, there is not much left for Internet infrastructure,” Gibello said.
(tags: ai funding eu horizon foss via:the-register ow2 europe)
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A decent looking no-code app builder, recommended by Cory of Last Week In AWS. Nice features: * offers a self-hosted version running in a Docker container * Free tier for up to 5 users and 500 workflow runs per month * Integration with AWS services (S3, Athena, DynamoDB), Postgres, MySQL and Google Sheets * Push notifications for mobile
(tags: retool apps hacking no-code coding via:lwia integration)
Invasions of privacy during the early years of the photographic camera
“Overexposed”, at the History News Network:
In 1904, a widow named Elizabeth Peck had her portrait taken at a studio in a small Iowa town. The photographer sold the negatives to Duffy’s Pure Malt Whiskey, a company that avoided liquor taxes for years by falsely advertising its product as medicinal. Duffy’s ads claimed the fantastical: that it cured everything from influenza to consumption; that it was endorsed by clergymen; that it could help you live until the age of 106. The portrait of Elizabeth Peck ended up in one of these dubious ads, published in newspapers across the country alongside what appeared to be her unqualified praise: “After years of constant use of your Pure Malt Whiskey, both by myself and as given to patients in my capacity as nurse, I have no hesitation in recommending it.” Duffy’s lies were numerous. Elizabeth Peck was not a nurse, and she had not spent years constantly slinging back malt beverages. In fact, she fully abstained from alcohol. Peck never consented to the ad. The camera’s first great age — which began in 1888 when George Eastman debuted the Kodak — is full of stories like this one. Beyond the wonders of a quickly developing artform and technology lay widespread lack of control over one’s own image, perverse incentives to make a quick buck, and generalized fear at the prospect of humiliation and the invasion of privacy.
Fantastic story, and interesting to see parallels with the modern experience of AI.
Phone geodata is being widely collected by US government agencies
More info on the current state of the post-Snowden geodata scraping:
[Byron Tau was told] the government was buying up reams of consumer data — information scraped from cellphones, social media profiles, internet ad exchanges and other open sources — and deploying it for often-clandestine purposes like law enforcement and national security in the U.S. and abroad. The places you go, the websites you visit, the opinions you post — all collected and legally sold to federal agencies. In his new book, _Means of Control_, Tau details everything he’s learned since that dinner: An opaque network of government contractors is peddling troves of data, a legal but shadowy use of American citizens’ information that troubles even some of the officials involved. And attempts by Congress to pass privacy protections fit for the digital era have largely stalled, though reforms to a major surveillance program are now being debated.
Great quote:Politico: You compare to some degree the state of surveillance in China versus the U.S. You write that China wants its citizens to know that they’re being tracked, whereas in the U.S., “the success lies in the secrecy.” What did you mean by that? That was a line that came in an email from a police officer in the United States who got access to a geolocation tool that allowed him to look at the movement of phones. And he was essentially talking about how great this tool was because it wasn’t widely, publicly known. The police could buy up your geolocation movements and look at them without a warrant. And so he was essentially saying that the success lies in the secrecy, that if people were to know that this was what the police department was doing, they would ditch their phones or they would not download certain apps.
Based on Wolfie Christl’s research in Germany, the same data is being scraped here, too, regardless of any protection the GDPR might supposedly provide: https://x.com/WolfieChristl/status/1813221172927975722(tags: government privacy surveillance geodata phones mobile us-politics data-protection gdpr)