Olives @olives@qoto.org

https://www.kiratas.com/2023/10/15/after-a-court-ban-portugal-makes-a-new-attempt-at-data-retention/

"For data protection advocates, data retention has long been a “zombie” that keeps rearing its head. This is currently being confirmed again in Portugal. There, the two major popular parties, the social democratic PS and the conservative-liberal PSD, with the support of other parliamentary forces and the government, agreed on another bill for the logging of user traces without cause. This is reported by the Portuguese weekly newspaper Diário de Notícias. Essentially, this is intended to introduce six-month storage of location and connection data."

"The initiative is surprising because in April 2022 the Portuguese Constitutional Court declared the crucial data retention clauses in a 2008 national law unconstitutional. The articles, which were found to be invalid, stipulated that providers of telecommunications and internet services had to keep user traces for a period of one year, even in the event of unsuccessful call attempts, and to release them in order to prevent and prosecute serious crimes. The Tribunal Constitucional (TC), in the light of the case law of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), concluded that “an undifferentiated and generalized obligation to store” all traffic data of all individuals “disproportionately restricts the right to privacy and informational self-determination.”"

The #chatcontrol is like a condom with a hole in it and someone insisting the hole only harms "bad people".

https://www.insider.com/utah-city-rallies-around-pole-dancing-skeleton-halloween-decoration-2023-10

"Some residents of a Utah town are rallying around a pole-dancing skeleton after the city said the risqué Halloween decoration had to be taken down."

"Residents have swarmed the town's Facebook page with comments supporting the skeleton and condemning the city for deleting its original post. Even unrelated posts from the city on social media are now being deluged with dozens of gifs of dancing skeletons."

"The mastermind behind the display, Christopher Fujishin, did comply with the city's order, moving the Halloween scene into his front yard instead."

https://techpolicy.press/kids-online-safety-act-will-censor-the-news/

"Imagine you’re a teenager who just survived a school shooting, but the government says you can’t read the news about it on social media because it might make you depressed. It sounds too ridiculous for even the US Congress. But under a bill currently being pushed by lawmakers in both parties and the White House, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), it could become reality.

Based in part on moral panic and unproven claims that social media is irreparably harming children, KOSA purports to “protect” kids by incentivizing censorship of online content. More than 90 LGBTQ+, human rights, and civil liberties organizations already oppose KOSA, arguing it will make kids less safe.

It will also make kids — and everyone else — less informed. At a time when disinformation is running rampant, KOSA will cause social media platforms to remove real journalism. The impact will be felt by everyone, not just kids."

https://www.wired.com/story/livestream-hostages-israel-hamas-war/

"industry experts say social media companies are showing a lack of transparency and an unwillingness to take the measures needed to prevent execution videos from spreading on their platforms, such as suspending livestreaming capabilities completely during the Israel-Hamas war."

"industry experts" "Imran Ahmed, the founder and CEO of Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that tracks hate speech on social platforms, tells WIRED."

So, no one is allowed to livestream now, because an extremist might abuse it...?

"If you have a snatch of copyrighted music in your video, their systems will detect it within a microsecond and take it down"

If we ignore all the false positives and abuses related to these systems...

https://nichegamer.com/the-coffin-of-andy-and-leyley-dev-anticipated-backlash-over-incest/

"criticism from social media users uncomfortable"

I wouldn't call that "criticism", it's abuse from random internet trolls.

By the way, if you think this kind of abuse is an Elon thing, it's not, it came long before.

They're probably going to withdraw it in the end, but they'll end up looking like complete idiots, like Apple did, and the usual suspects will see them as a weak target.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/23/google-decides-to-pull-up-the-ladder-on-the-open-internet-pushes-for-unconstitutional-regulatory-proposals/

"Facebook did it six years ago " Facebook tried it in 2021, and they backpeddled after they received nothing but mockery for it.

"It’s basically lobbying for age verification, just in the guise of “age assurance,” which is effectively “age verification, but if you’re a smaller company you can get it wrong some undefined amount of time, until someone sues you.”"

You have to remember that Google's entire business model involves collecting your data and targeting ads at you. They also want to reduce the number of false impressions (i.e. from bots) on particular ads. They also don't want to look like the villains here, thus all this nonsense and mincing of words.

It's useful not to look at this as an isolated event but one accompanied by tougher stances on ad blockers and an attempt to push DRM on the web.

"While cynical people will say that maybe Google is supporting these policies hoping that they will continue to be found unconstitutional, I see little evidence to support that."

Pushing clearly unconstitutional laws in the hope they'll be found unconstitutional is still very bad tactically.

“age assurance” I've seen people complaining about it on some other site, I think it was Instagram?, and they basically just permanently ban you, and don't care for false positives.

https://www.gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats

"We entrust Google with our most private communications because we assume the company takes every precaution to safeguard our data. It doesn't. A Google engineer spied on four underage teens for months before the company was notified of the abuses."

To embarrass Google, I'm gonna bring GCreep back up.

With anti-misinformation laws like that, I can't help but wonder if you wouldn't get a scenario like: Fined / jailed for parroting something he saw in a major newspaper.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/20/section-230-guru-washington-tread-lightly-misinformation/

"As Kosseff recounted to me, the heated debate over Section 230 inspired his latest project: a new book dissecting the United States’ free speech tradition — and making the case that officials’ efforts to tackle misinformation often could backfire."

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/10/22/opinion/jeff-kosseff-liar-in-a-crowded-theater-interview/

"Legal scholar Jeff Kosseff thinks a government crackdown on misinformation is a very bad idea. In his new book, “Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation,” he makes the case that the courts have improved our country by gradually strengthening legal protections for false speech — a principle that should hold even though new technologies are changing how information looks, is created, and flows."

"For the really bad cases of misinformation, we’re often not dealing with completely rational actors. Even if they intentionally distribute false speech, legal penalties might not deter them. And yet sanctions might silence those with good intentions."

"Also, our understanding of what is true can evolve with more debate — and you don’t allow knowledge to grow if you threaten people with prosecution."

https://reclaimthenet.org/new-york-ag-letitia-james-backtracks-on-censorship-demands-of-rumble

"In the face of determined resistance in defense of free speech, New York Attorney General Letitia James has withdrawn her overreach in demanding that Rumble, the social media platform, censor expression related to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war."

"This move arrives in reaction to the advocacy of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), asserting that her initiative blatantly contravened the First Amendment and a federal court order restraining the enforcement of New York’s Online Hate Speech Law."

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/23/queensland-climate-protesters-case-adjourned-charges-xr-extinction-rebellion-brisbane-qld

"The group face charges – not laid in more than 30 years – of disturbing the legislature during a protest in which they unfurled banners with anti-fossil fuel slogans from the public gallery and interrupted question time by chanting for about three minutes last November."

"The charges fall under section 56 of Queensland’s criminal code, which sets a three-year maximum jail term. But a Brisbane court heard on Monday that a later section of the same act repeals section 56 as an offence."

"Section 717 of the criminal code explicitly says that a person cannot be charged with, prosecuted, convicted or punished for disturbing the legislature."

Wasn't that "non-profit" created by Reagan and pals? I forgot the story behind it but I think it was like that.

Seeing one of Ylva's pals, who slapped together a very sketchy poll, offer up a weak defence of her is quite something. Once again, I'm not giving them clicks.

First off, they assert things have gone well for a decade with one particular algorithm. Except. It hasn't. The algorithm "PhotoDNA" (which was sort of secret) got leaked in 2021 and we learned the child porn "hashes" could be reversed with a trained AI model to reveal the original photographs (albeit at a much lower quality). This was tested with innocent photographs. I wonder why they wanted to keep this algorithm secret.

Also, who is to say this algorithm hasn't had significant issues? Do third party contractors (maybe in some country like Kenya) moderating content know enough about which and what algorithm (and the technical intricacies and civil rights issues) flagged a particular post to "blow the whistle"? Do they even think of these kinds of issues? There might be many false positives, and instances of state harassment, and you might never know.

They also make a point that there is a "small chance" of being hit by it. At scale though, that would mean that many messages might be disclosed almost constantly to people unknown to them. That someone might archive it as irrelevant doesn't really change that someone's privacy has been violated. Depending on how "clever" (or resource stretched) an official at the E.U. is on any particular day, they might just pass through all of the reports to their buddies in the same building (with staff transferring between the two departments, did you read that part of the proposal?).

They play down the implications of the "grooming algorithm" (this is the only paragraph which covers this, the others refer to the other one), ignoring that the accuracy is notoriously low, one news article put it at around 50%, though there are vendors who put it higher. Being accused of being a child predator looking to abuse kids is not exactly harmless.

While the model with the U.S.-based non-profit, and "voluntary" scanning with this algorithm, is not great, bringing the government into the picture creates a unique risk of things being overtaken by politics. This has always been a point of concern for me. It's not the best but it is also "the devil you know".

Another problem you run into is that using this algorithm seems to involve uploading files to Microsoft's servers for them to check to see if there is any evil in there. Big Tech could run the algorithm for themselves. For a smaller site, that means being surveilled by giants or governments, and it would also be a burden to their operations. Also, Microsoft markets immediately alerting the police as a selling point of this product.

Also, wasn't this one of those groups which got Sweden to pass a brazenly unconstitutional law? It was used to arrest someone who posted art of imaginary "children playing in water by the beach". This was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. It was a brazen disregard of human rights. When people do things like this, we need to hold them personally (and I do mean individual accountability, not simply letting them hide behind an "org", has anyone lost their job because of something this disgusting?) to account.

They also appear to be anti-porn, which is a problematic position imo (https://qoto.org/@olives/111083302650803082) (an affront to due process and freedom of expression).

#chatcontrol

https://reason.com/2023/10/22/the-minesweeper-moral-panic/

"Over-the-top violence in such video games as Mortal Kombat and Doom drew hand-wringing moral outrage from worrywart parents and government scolds throughout the '90s. Minesweeper—in which players click around a rectangular grid of squares trying to avoid hidden mines, using logical rules to interpret numbers—seemed like it should be safe from controversy.

Yet somehow the game was central to a minor moral panic that formed around pre-installed computer games as Windows spread through offices in the '90s. Together, Minesweeper and Solitaire were seen as an unwelcome office distraction at best and a dire threat to worker productivity at worst."

No fun for you.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/19/eu-launches-crackdown-on-cocaine-smuggling

"The European commissioner for home affairs, Ylva Johansson, said young people were becoming caught up in an increasingly booming and brutal trade that was one of Europe’s biggest security threats."

I see Ylva is also a drug warrior. A lot of things make a lot more sense now.

"“They are being radicalised and groomed to become killers. They are the drug gang equivalent of child soldiers,” she said."

Even repurposing the same arguments and hoping no one notices.

"The EU wants to strengthen strategies to disrupt the recruitment of children, including the identification of early signs such as children caught involved in shoplifting or dropping out of school."

Pre-crime profiling based on fuzzy (and probably inaccurate) signs.

Even spooky numbers. I've never trusted Ylva numbers though. In any case, I think that tends to come from it being a black market.

I think that an "AI" chatbot is probably a better tool for roleplay than it is for providing information which someone wants to know.