Olives @olives@qoto.org

Happy Human Rights Day. #privacy

Apparently, it's Human Rights Day, so I guess you should give free expression, privacy, and those other good things your love today.

It's worth noting that one of the Australian data breaches included "records of treatments" (which were of great interest to criminals), just like #ehds.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/22/labor-mandatory-data-retention-laws-companies-hacks-cyber-security-strategy

Reinstating the "they're turning the frogs gay" guy doesn't strike me as the most important free expression issue to solve on Twitter.

I probably don't really need to explain this bit.

Both of these things are things where someone suspends well-established rights and principles in the hopes of fighting something bad.

Also, these measures only ever keep escalating, and no one questions whether they're particularly proportionate. There is also a very single-minded mindset about it.

Could probably think of more.

Those are the parallels that I can see there.

I think metadata is also worthy of protection though.

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2023/12/06/end-to-end-encryption-protects-everyone-says-the-head-of-whatsapp The Whatsapp guy has a take on end-to-end encryption.

"Man accused of creating AI porn marketplace"

That makes it sound as if producing porn is a bad thing (which it isn't)...

For some extras, originally the phrase was an acronym, but I expanded it out for you (as I don't presume that everyone knows every bit of jargon), and added the quotes.

Also, the article attached to it is even more explicit and direct about that relationship language "among minors", and they're also pretty explicit that that is what they mean with the jargon.

A country where privacy / security experts were routinely brushed aside by people wanting to prop up some sort of Orwellian surveillance state.

Yup, I just copy-pasted a previous post (and switched out a couple of links and the name, one as I tried to further elaborate in the newer research data post).

The previous post was already fairly good, so no need to draft out a new one, and I don't really want Australian censorship practices to live rent free inside my head.

Not that I like the censorship parts of this IARC system, but even there, it was really overkill for just keeping some content that might be too mature for the "Teen" rated base game out.

Now, it seems to be polluting this site which should be for tracking actual censorship.

Also, the "SEO firm", uh, we have no real way to measure this, uh, our friends over at the SEO firm reckon it might be in this region. But, putting it forward as if it is some sort of hard data. Good grief.

It was very "there are bad people doing bad things somewhere on the Internet", then they tried to drum it up, and it just blew up in their faces when they tried to cherry-pick tiny numbers as "evidence" of it being some big bad thing.

It's one of those crud reports where someone pulls some superficial bits of information over some, what appears to be a rare phenomena, then someone else uses it to try to manufacture a panic, but even the language there seems over-blown ("at scale", scale, what scale).

Blowing up a panic over every random spammer or irrelevant site is silly.

And I think what was so stunning, was just how weak their arguments were, and particularly, what points they focused on.

Also, a significant amount of site traffic on the open web comes from bots, that would be one to consider with actual traffic data (which appears to be absent here).

https://public-assets.graphika.com/reports/graphika-report-a-revealing-picture.pdf

This "report" is a mess.

It tries to suggest criminals are operating at scale but all the evidence presented suggests it is a very small scale operation (and data from elsewhere shows that it is one which is being actively tackled, albeit at times with inappropriate tools with collateral consequences).

It briefly references a gossipy and very likely misleading news article which is actually irrelevant to this particular issue.

It tries to present "thousands of posts" as evidence of an "active website", except a "discussion forum" on the brink of death might have similar numbers, and it's not unusual for individual users (on inactive and non-abusive) websites to have thousands of posts apiece (particularly, the "Admin" account). It's even possible for an admin to pay people to create posts to make their own website appear more appealing to prospective users than competing sites.

And that is in the case of a single site, this report appears to reference as many as a dozen or more, likely further diluting their activity.

It references an "SEO firm" (of questionable repute) as a source of "traffic data". The only issue is that this SEO firm, which specializes in providing dirt on competitors, does not have access to site traffic data. They can only provide estimates.

In any case, even in the case of some genuine activity, this is still very weak material to use for trumped up AI scare pieces.

https://www.refused-classification.com/censorship-timelines/game-iarc/ The horror game "STAR" got flagged again. Probably a new build.

https://www.refused-classification.com/censorship-timelines/game-iarc/ Unfortunately, there is a lot of spam in here now from Fortnite (because someone decided to adopt IARC for something it's not intended for).