Tag: technology

I’ve seen this facial recognition software in action. It’s both creepy and impressive.

Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos.

Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.

His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

Being publicly recognizable is not really a concern to someone like me, since I was never given a choice about going public on the Internet or not. But it is a massive problem for the average individual, even those who have been careful to avoid social media. Sooner, rather than later, nations and their lawmakers are going to have to decide whether to embrace or reject the use of identification technology. I assume that most of them are going to embrace it, although the governments that come after the complete collapse of the neo-liberal world order may not.

It’s not right, of course, but I can’t say I’m going to shed copious tears over Nick Fuentes being demonetized by Google:

Nicholas Fuentes, who gained headlines earlier this year, has been banned from streaming on YouTube, demonetized, and likely will be banned outright soon.

Now I suppose we’ll find out if he’s genuinely a fighter or if he’s just another ex-YouTuber playing victim. Either way, it’s a great time to go after YouTube, as the parent organization’s top-flight legal chief is currently exiting Alphabet:

The changing of the guard at Alphabet  continues. Roughly one month after Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced they’d be stepping down as the CEO and president of the search giant’s parent company, one of their top lieutenants, Alphabet’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, told employees that he is also leaving the company.

I understand he is retiring in order to spend more time making new families.

The former employee with whom he shares a child, Jennifer Blakely, published a post on Medium last summer in which she described Drummond as a serial philanderer who left his wife for her, then left her and the son that he fathered with her for another now-former Google employee.

Blakely also claimed Drummond had had “an affair with his ‘personal assistant’ who he moved into one of his new homes.”

One day later, Drummond issued a statement of his own, acknowledging his relationship with Blakely and their “difficult break-up 10 years ago.” He went on to state that, “Other than Jennifer, I never started a relationship with anyone else who was working at Google or Alphabet. Any suggestion otherwise is simply untrue.”

Days after issuing the statement, Drummond married a Google employee he’d been dating.

Subscribe to Unauthorized, because no one knows how much longer the Darkstream will be on YouTube.

But someone did:

The surveillance video taken from outside Jeffrey Epstein’s jail cell on the day of his first apparent suicide attempt has been permanently deleted, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

Epstein, the disgraced financier who was facing federal sex-trafficking charges, was found semiconscious in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, or MCC, in New York around 1:27 a.m. on July 23.

But that video is now gone because MCC officials mistakenly saved video from a different floor of the federal detention facility, prosecutors said in a court filing. The MCC “inadvertently preserved video from the wrong tier within the MCC and as a result, video from outside the defendant’s cell on July 22-23, 2019 no longer exists,” the court papers say.

It’s time to outlaw the surveillance state. The cameras quite obviously don’t work well enough to permit it to function at all.

The Quartering, previously banned by Patreon, receives an invitation to join Patreon and disrespectfully declines.

Hi Jeremy,

My name’s Tom and I work on the Creator Partnerships team at Patreon. We help creators build long-term creative businesses by investing in a direct relationship with their fans.

I’m reaching out to you to see if you’re interested in discussing what Patreon membership could look like for you. We’ve previously partnered with creators like Tolarian Community College, Strictly Better Mtg and Dungeon Dudes to help them launch on Patreon. We’d love to see if something similar could be a fit, especially given the recent COPPA ruling which has unexpectedly impacted channels despite their content not being for kids.

Are you free this week?

Best,
Tom

Unlike the December 20th TOS change, which was a direct reaction to the Legal Legion’s actions, I very much doubt this had anything to do with Patreon changing its policies or its attitude towards creators it had previously banned. We already know that Patreon’s processes are shockingly amateurish and disorganized, and that people in one team have no idea what the people in another team are doing.

So, it’s much more likely that Tom and the others in Creator Partnerships is working from a list of creators with a good-sized audience that has never been compared with the list of creators that Sydney and the others in Trust & Safety have banned.

One of the interesting things Jeremy observes is that Patreon processes about $1 billion per year. Since they take about 4 percent after the processing fees, that means their annual revenue is only around $40 million. Which, of course, means that they are even more fragile than we had originally calculated.

The second iteration of SocialGalactic is in active Beta. All Annual, Premium, and Basic UATV subscribers have been invited. If you are a current subscriber and have not received an invite, please email me with SG2 INVITE in the subject from the email you used to subscribe to Unauthorized and the level of your current subscription.

Burn Unit members will be invited soon, after which we will invite the creator-specific subscribers. Following that, we will invite Castalia Deluxe subscribers. Those involved in other projects that do not involve those subscriptions, such as Rebel’s Run investors, Replatforming patrons, and the AHQ Rubble Bouncers, will receive special badges they can use if they wish.

Only after all of the various contributors have been invited will we prepare to offer actual SG2 subscriptions and open up the site to free users.

And if you’re already on SocialGalactic, feel free to comment upon how it’s working for you and what improvements you would like to see.

Shadow-banning is now officially a feature of the Twitter services, according to their revised Terms of Use:

The process of limiting how many people can see posts from a certain Twitter account is commonly referred to as “shadow banning,” and many (including the company itself) have claimed that it is simply a conspiracy theory by conservatives and that Twitter does not limit the reach of content on its platform. But now, a change to Twitter’s terms of service appears to give the social media platform the right to do exactly that.

ReclaimTheNet.org notes that a recent change to Twitter’s terms of service adds that the company “may also remove or refuse to distribute any Content on the Services, limit distribution or visibility of any Content on the service…”

Twitter does not clarify what content may be subject to “limited distribution or visibility” giving the company free rein to limit any content it sees fit.

Sadly, the Legal Legion can’t take any credit for this particular modification. In other social media-related news, SG2 has added video for a very select number of Paragon accounts. We’re just testing it now, so if you’re on SG2 already, don’t ask for it, please.

The problem with which we’ve been dealing for the last few years is just a microcosm of a much larger one that has disturbing long-term implications for the future direction of the intersection of technology and law:

The resounding message in the Pew report is this: There’s no way the problem in public discourse is going to solve itself. “Between troll attacks, chilling effects of government surveillance and censorship, etc., the internet is becoming narrower every day,” said Randy Bush, a research fellow at Internet Initiative Japan, in his response to Pew.

Many of those polled said that we’re now witnessing the emergence of “flame wars and strategic manipulation” that will only get worse. This goes beyond obnoxious comments, or Donald Trump’s tweets, or even targeted harassment. Instead, we’ve entered the realm of “weaponized narrative” as a 21st-century battle space, as the authors of a recent Defense One essay put it. And just like other battle spaces, humans will need to develop specialized technology for the fight ahead.

Researchers have already used technology to begin to understand what they’re up against. Earlier this month, a team of computer scientists from Stanford University and Cornell University wrote about how they used machine-learning algorithms to forecast whether a person was likely to start trolling. Using their algorithm to analyze a person’s mood and the context of the discussion they were in, the researchers got it right 80 percent of the time.   

They learned that being in a bad mood makes a person more likely to troll, and that trolling is most frequent late at night (and least frequent in the morning). They also tracked the propensity for trolling behavior to spread. When the first comment in a thread is written by a troll—a nebulous term, but let’s go with it—then it’s twice as likely that additional trolls will chime in compared with a conversation that’s not led by a troll to start, the researchers found. On top of that, the more troll comments there are in a discussion, the more likely it is that participants will start trolling in other, unrelated threads.

“A single troll comment in a discussion—perhaps written by a person who woke up on the wrong side of the bed—can lead to worse moods among other participants, and even more troll comments elsewhere,” the Stanford and Cornell researchers wrote. “As this negative behavior continues to propagate, trolling can end up becoming the norm in communities if left unchecked.”

Using technology to understand when and why people troll is essential, but many people agree that the scale of the problem requires technological solutions. Stopping trolls isn’t as simple as creating spaces that prevent anonymity, many of those surveyed told Pew, because doing so also enables “governments and dominant institutions to even more freely employ surveillance tools to monitor citizens, suppress free speech, and shape social debate,” Pew wrote.

We’re already seeing how companies like Facebook and Google have weaponized the concept of “fake news”, and now entire countries are following suit. In what is a crushing refutation of libertarian theory, the Internet and the devolution of what were once civilized anonymous discussion spaces on bulletin boards and CompuServe have clearly demonstrated that Man cannot handle the freedom of a perceived lack of accountability.

There are deeper philosophical aspects to this, that lend additional clarity to traditional thinking about morality and ethics. Even the most devout atheist should be able to recognize at this point that Man was not made for, nor can he reliably handle, even the perceived absence of a Lawgiver to whom he knows he will be held responsible for his actions.

It’s bitterly amusing to see the USA and EU fussing over their discovery that the rest of the world is not going to play with their stacked deck:

A move by the United Nations to approve a Russian-sponsored and China-backed resolution that aims to create a new convention on cybercrime has alarmed rights groups and Western powers that fear a bid to restrict online freedom.

The resolution was approved on Friday by the general assembly by a vote of 79-60, with 33 abstentions.

It establishes an expert committee representing all regions of the world “to elaborate a comprehensive international convention on countering the use of information and communications technologies for criminal purposes”. The resolution said the committee will meet in August 2020 to agree on an outline of its activities.

The United States, European powers and rights groups fear that the language is code for legitimising crackdowns on expression, with numerous countries defining criticism of the government as “criminal”.

Meanwhile, the US, the European powers, and rights groups are busy cracking down on expression of which they do not approve. They simply don’t have a leg to stand on, and the rest of the world knows it. Do they really think that China, Russia, India, and everyone else don’t see that no one is allowed to criticize certain peoples, races, and orientations despite this supposed freedom of expression?

And furthermore, Huawei is discovering the advantage of being forced to build your own platforms:

Being cut off from the world’s most popular mobile OS and being left with its open-source version at best was a blow for Huawei – but the split between the two tech giants is a sword that is capable of cutting both ways. Just months after Google’s decision, Huawei unveiled its own Harmony mobile OS and rolled out a new flagship smartphone without any proprietary Google apps. It vowed to finalize the development of Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) – a replacement for popular Google apps – by the end of the year.

The Chinese giant did not stop at that, and entered into negotiations with India’s top 150 app developers to convince them to publish their products on HMS, which itself could offer up to 150 ‘own apps’ to customers all over the world.

“In the future, Chinese companies might push the American one from the entire Asian market. Huawei’s indigenously developed services might soon replace Google services like Gmail, YouTube, and Google Maps. Then, the US company will be in real trouble.”

I switched from Samsung to Huawei several years ago. Both their tablets and their phones are great; as for the OS, I barely noticed when the switch to Harmony took place. This is why I have no doubt that we will soon see a China-Russia-India technological alliance that, unlike the China-Russia-Iran military alliance, will be fundamentally offensive in nature.

On Tuesday, December 17 we were hit by multiple big DDoS attacks. Multiple prefixes were attacked. Needless to say, we dealt with it without any real trouble because we have been under constant cyberattack since Castalia House endorsed GamerGate in 2015.

The VFM have been instructed to track down the parties responsible while the LLoE is reviewing the applicable laws in the relevant legal jurisdictions. When we find them, we will file both civil and criminal charges.

In case you ever wondered why we don’t disclose information about our operations and how they work, this should suffice to explain why. We don’t talk much about these attacks, but we have been dealing with them every day for more than four years now.

This is what those worried about a YouTube purge should be worrying about rather than the new terms of service:

YouTube will no longer allow videos that “maliciously insult someone” based on “protected attributes” such as race, gender identity or sexuality. The video-sharing platform will also ban “implied threats of violence” as part of its new harassment policy.

A row erupted in June after a prominent video-maker said he had been the target of abuse by another YouTube star. At the time, YouTube said its rules had not been broken. But it has now deleted many of the videos in question.

“Even if a single video doesn’t cross the line, with our new harassment policy we can take a pattern of behaviour into account for enforcement,” Neal Mohan, chief product officer at YouTube, told the BBC.

Then again, it doesn’t really matter because there are no actual rules to which anyone, much less a banned creator, can hold YouTube accountable or any authority to which one can appeal. This means that YouTube will do whatever it wants right up until the moment that it finds suddenly itself paying out tens of millions of dollars in the inevitable class action lawsuit.

We’re not dealing with great legal minds here. Notice how everything is veiled in subjectives; they can’t simply ban insults because doing so would be relatively easy to objectively observe. Is it an insult, Y/N? So, in order to allow selective enforcement, they ban “malicious” insults depending upon whatever motivation their mindreaders determine applies. Or difficult-to-define things such as implications and patterns of behavior.