The Blog Experiment | Technology Nonsense and Internet Tripe

Documents that have become available recently and reports based on them, say that in Canada, too, the government is effectively trying to pressure social media sites to remove certain news articles – but apparently, at least in one case, without success. The case relates to links to a Toronto Sun article that has not been named, and the “request” for censorship came from the the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada in September 2021. The board is considered an independent body, but it reports to Canada’s parliament via the immigration minister. The claim made against the article was that it featured “serious errors of fact risking” – and furthermore, it is alleged that this would undermine public confidence in the board’s real or purported independence, and of trust in the system handling refugees. source: Michael Geist For now, neither the Board nor the newspaper in question are responding to queries, the Canadian Press outlet said. As for why Facebook and Twitter – to whom the request was addressed, and who are normally, and particularly at that time, very quick to “pull the censorship trigger” – happened to deny it – it turns out they thought they were able to tell Canada’s government that since the article wasn’t original content on the platform itself, i.e., this was a link, it was none of their business. (Note the marked difference in the way Twitter handled links to the New York Post story about the Hunter Biden laptop – which proved to be…Canada’s government directly leaned on social media platforms to censor news and tweets

Skiff is one of the projects originating from the past several years of severe focus on censorship and surveillance by Big Tech, and now the platform is announcing the launch of its end-to-end encrypted calendar mobile apps and a new, low-priced paid email plan with added storage and more. Skiff, based in San Francisco and present on the scene since 2021, started out as an end-to-end encrypted email service and collaboration tool, as for the most part a (mostly) open-source alternative to Google Docs. The offer these days includes encrypted calendars, documents, and files. With the just announced Skiff Essential, those behind it say they have responded to user demands with a new paid plan costing $3 a month, which gives the customer one custom domain, storage space increase (up to 10 GB), extra aliases (up to 10), unlimited folders and labels, and all other features available to free tier users. On mobile (both Android and iOS) Skiff now has calendar apps, which allow you to view daily schedules. While according to data currently available, not all elements of the Skiff code are open source, its end-to-end encryption model was detailed in a public whitepaper during the 2021 beta launch, and the service uses what’s known as the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for file storage. The focus with the product might be one on security (i.e., privacy) rather than full open source – even though there are many who will question how the former might not be fully dependent on…Skiff launches end-to-end encrypted calendar apps on mobile

Legislation for a digital identity verification system in the US has progressed to the Senate for debate. That means that the US could soon have a digital ID, which is opposed by most digital rights groups over privacy concerns. The Improving Digital Identity Act of 2023 was introduced by Independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and GOP Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming. We obtained a copy of the bill for you here. It was introduced in the Senate for debate last month after being approved by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “The lack of an easy, affordable, reliable, and secure way for organizations, businesses, and government agencies to identify whether an individual is who they claim to be online, creates an attack vector that is widely exploited by adversaries in cyberspace and precludes many high-value transactions from being available online,” the text of the bill states. “Incidents of identity theft and identity fraud continue to rise in the United States, where more than 293,000,000 people were impacted by data breaches in 2021. “Since 2017, losses resulting from identity fraud have increased by 333 percent, and, in 2020, those losses totaled $56,000,000,000.” The bill would require the creation of an interagency task force to oversee a public-private collaboration to “help all citizens more easily and securely engage in transactions online” and “prove who they are online.” If you’re tired of censorship, cancel culture, and the erosion of civil liberties subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post US Senate…US Senate to debate digital ID plans

Independent journalist Alex Berenson has filed a lawsuit against President Joe Biden, a Pfizer board member, and others for pressuring Twitter to ban his account. His account was banned after posting a tweet questioning COVID-19 vaccines. Initially, Twitter resisted the calls to ban Berenson. However, eventually the social media platform caved to the pressure. Berenson sued Twitter in a federal court in California, accusing the company of violating its contract with him. The lawsuit resulted in a settlement and Twitter admitting it should not have banned him. The defendants in the new lawsuit, filed on April 12, are President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former White House COVID-19 official Dr. Andrew Slavitt, Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, and the White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty. In a meeting with Twitter, Slavitt and other White House officials asked why Berenson had not been “kicked off” Twitter. Slavitt has previously called Berenson a conspiracy theorist. Flaherty recently said that he remembered Slavitt “expressing his view that Twitter was not enforcing its content guidelines with respect to Alex Berenson’s tweets, and that employees from Twitter disagreed with that view.” Gottlieb also asked Twitter to suspend Berenson. He has also previously called for the suspension of other people, including former acting FDA commissioner Dr. Brett Girior. In the offending tweet, Berenson wrote, “It doesn’t stop infection. Or Transmission. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.” According to his lawsuit, the defendants violated his First Amendment rights. We…Biden Administration is sued, accused of pressuring Twitter to censor journalist Alex Berenson

This post is for Reclaim The Net members. Join Already a supporter? Login here If you’re tired of censorship, cancel culture, and the erosion of civil liberties subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Policing conferences reveal the next wave of surveillance technology appeared first on Reclaim The Net.Policing conferences reveal the next wave of surveillance technology

Justin Hendrix is CEO and Editor of Tech Policy Press. Views expressed here are his own. Fritzchens Fritz / Better Images of AI / GPU shot etched 3 / CC-BY 4.0 One of the points of contention in the drafting of the European Union’s AI Act is how to classify risk across the chain of actors involved in developing and deploying systems that incorporate artificial intelligence. Last year, the Council of the European Union introduced new language into the proposed Act taking into account “where AI systems can be used for many different purposes (general purpose AI), and where there may be circumstances where general purpose AI technology gets integrated into another system which may become high-risk.”  Now, even as EU policymakers continue to refine versions of the AI Act, a group of international AI experts have published a joint policy brief arguing the EU should indeed regulate “general purpose artificial intelligence” (GPAI) as “high risk.”  The experts, including Amba Kak and Dr. Sarah Myers West from the AI Now Institute, Dr. Alex Hanna and Dr. Timnit Gebru from the Distributed AI Research Institute, Maximilian Gahntz of the Mozilla Foundation, Irene Solaiman from Hugging Face, Dr. Mehtab Khan from the Yale  Law School Information Society Project (ISP), and independent researcher Dr. Zeerak Talat, are joined in sum by more than 50 institutional and individual signatories. The brief makes five main points: GPAI is an expansive category. For the EU AI Act to be future proof, it must apply across a spectrum…Experts Urge EU to Classify General Purpose AI as High Risk

Mainstream publications like The Atlantic, or The New York Times, or even digitally native publications like Vox and Buzzfeed, don’t get much traffic from Twitter. Extrapolating from third-party tools, Twitter drives around 3% of overall traffic for publications. The traffic is variable; here are 15 examples using data for March of 2023. Traffic from Twitter 2.45% – nbcnews.com Traffic from Twitter 3.77% – theatlantic.com Traffic from Twitter 1.87% – nytimes.com Traffic from Twitter 0.28% – bustle.com Traffic from Twitter 2.60% – vox.com Traffic from Twitter 1.22% – buzzfeed.com Traffic from Twitter 1.60% – gizmodo.com Traffic from Twitter 2.70% – futurism.com Traffic from Twitter 3.51% – vanityfair.com Traffic from Twitter 5.42% – variety.com Traffic from Twitter 4.88% – thedailybeast.com Traffic from Twitter 0.03% – healthline.com Traffic from Twitter 0.27% – cosmopolitan.com Traffic from Twitter 4.08% – bloomberg.com Traffic from Twitter 1.49% – businessinsider.com These numbers are approximately consistent across any batch of 15 publications. If using the same method to establish the Twitter traffic for the 15 media sites anyone most recently visited, I’d expect a similar spread where only entertainment or crypto news cracks 5% of total traffic from Twitter. Let’s Talk NPR I bring this up because NPR yesterday announced that the organization will no longer use Twitter. NPR.org seemingly receives about 1.68% of it’s traffic from Twitter. At the time of writing NPR has four of the top 100 podcasts on Apple Podcasts based on new subscribers weighted for recency. Other methods for calculation of popularity put NPR’s myriad of podcasts at over 20 million collective monthly listeners. In…Twitter Is Not A Tentpole Traffic Driver For NPR

For Push ROI I wrote about how much traffic NPR is likely to lose by leaving Twitter. It’s under 1/5th of a percent. Twitter is not a traffic driver for NPR. Twitter Is Not A Tentpole Traffic Driver For NPR Between March 24-31 NPR with it’s 8.8 million Twitter followers, posted about 260 Tweets, receiving  approximately 36,400,000 impressions on Twitter. Assigning NPR a 1.5% click-through rate (CTR), an estimation that is probably 3X the CTR for an account that size, NPR’s main Twitter drove 546,000 clicks to NPR.org that week. Over the month lets say the main NPR Twitter account sent at most 2.18 million clicks to NPR.org.Mason Pelt, April 13, 2023, pushroi.com The post NPR Leaving Twitter May Cost The Company 0.176% of Total Website Traffic appeared first on Mason Pelt.NPR Leaving Twitter May Cost The Company 0.176% of Total Website Traffic

What in the Suge Knight? Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee — tech exec’s alleged killer also worked in tech Mission Local is informed that the San Francisco Police Department early this morning made an arrest in the April 4 killing of tech executive Bob Lee, following an operation undertaken outside the city’s borders. The alleged killer also works in tech and is a man Lee purportedly knew.Joe Eskenazi, April 13, 2023, missionlocal.org Nima Momeni founder of Expand IT was arrested by San Francisco-area police in connection with the April 4, 2023, murder of CashApp Founder and Block CTO Bob Lee. More coverage: KnowTechie, KGO-TV The post Man Arrested In Connection With Murder Of Block CTO appeared first on Mason Pelt.Man Arrested In Connection With Murder Of Block CTO

So anyway, New York City police have acquired an unpopular handful of expensive robots. These robots were paid for with asset forfeiture funds, meaning money that NYPD collected without necessarily proving it was involved in a crime. RoboCop? No, RoboDog: Robotic dog rejoins New York police The city’s first robot police dog was leased in 2020 by Adams’ predecessor, former Mayor Bill de Blasio, but the city’s contract for the device was cut short after critics derided it as creepy and dystopian.Karen Matthews, April 12, 2023, apnews.com It gets worse. Robots deployed to assist New York City police … again This time, using asset forfeiture funds, the NYPD has spent $750,000 on two “Digidogs.” Built by Massachusetts-based Boston Dynamics, the quadruped robot — also known as Spot — is incredibly versatile and can operate autonomously or semi-autonomously.Trevor Mogg, April 11, 2023, digitaltrends.com The post NYC Mayor Will Bow To Anti-robot Dog Pressure appeared first on Mason Pelt.NYC Mayor Will Bow To Anti-robot Dog Pressure