When the Pew Research Center asks American internet users for their bottom-line judgment about the role of digital technology in their own lives, the vast majority feel it is a good thing.
Yet, over the past 18 months a drumbeat of concerns about the personal and societal impacts of technology has been growing.
In light of these mounting concerns, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center queried technology experts, scholars and health specialists on this question: Over the next decade, how will changes in digital life impact people’s overall well-being physically and mentally?
While many experts say digital life will continue to expand people’s boundaries and opportunities, nearly a third think that people’s overall well-being will be more harmed than helped in coming years.
Many experts say digital life will continue to expand people’s boundaries and opportunities. Yet nearly a third think that people’s overall well-being will be more harmed than helped in coming years. Read our new canvassing of experts on the future of well-being in a digital world.
The Internet of Shit: a godsend for abusers and stalkers
People who help domestic abuse survivors say that they are facing an
epidemic of women whose abusers are torturing them by breaking into
their home smart devices, gaslighting them by changing their thermostat
settings, locking them out of their homes, spying on them through their
cameras.
The abusers are often ex-partners who retain authentication passwords
that allow them to access the IoT devices after a breakup.
Many of the women facing this abuse are wealthy and well-off (domestic
abuse affects people of all incomes, but wealthier people are more
likely to own these gadgets). In interviews with the NYT, survivors
called it “jungle warfare” and “asymmetric warfare,” likening their
ex-partners to guerrilla fighters attacking in secret.
Some women have been assessed for mental health issues because their
stories sounded like paranoid delusions. My colleague Eva Galperin from
the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that for many of the
women, the devices that are being used to torment them also connect them
to the wider world, and they are loathe to further isolate themselves
while they’re in such difficult straits.
Saturday June 16, 2018 21 students were graduated from the Association of Linux Friends Limbe.
This occasion was graced by the presence of the Chief of Isokolo villageand some other dignitaries. The ceremony started at about 1:30 pm due to the bad weather which lasted all day. With the arrival of all the graduating students, their guardians and the invited guests the occasion commenced.
Appointment of members of the high table.
Parents and guardians on the graduating students on the graduation ground
Welcome speech from the proprietor of the Association of Linux Friends
we also had a speech from a student from the beginner’s class, talking about their experiences at the Association.
Two traditional dances presented by the graduating students. The students presented the Bakweri cultural dance.
and the Bayangi cultural dance
There was presentation from the advance class students on Robotics(using the programming language ‘Python’ to make a robot), Radio and a static web page.
Next was ballet presented by the graduating students.
We’re talking about an effort either by an adversary aimed at the United States or by the United States aimed at an adversary, to try to conduct a war before the first shot is even fired. That if you can so disable the adversary’s electric power grid, the cell phone system, emergency response, the communications to their defenses, in some cases even their ability to launch a nuclear weapon or just an ordinary missile, then you’ve kind of won before any shot was fired and it’s entirely conceivable that you could achieve your political objectives before you actually started shelling anything or dropping bombs.
On June 20, the EU’s legislative committee will vote on the new Copyright directive,
and decide whether it will including the controversial “Article 13”
(automated censorship of anything an algorithm identifies as a copyright
violation) and “Article 11” (no linking to news stories without paid
permission from the site).
These proposals will make starting new internet companies effectively
impossible – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and the other US giants
will be able to negotiate favourable rates and build out the
infrastructure to comply with these proposals, but no one else will. The
EU’s regional tech success stories – say Seznam.cz,
a successful Czech search competitor to Google – don’t have
$60-100,000,000 lying around to build out their filters, and lack the
leverage to extract favorable linking licenses from news sites.
If Articles 11 and 13 pass, American companies will be in charge of
Europe’s conversations, deciding which photos and tweets and videos can
be seen by the public, and who may speak.
The MEP Julia Reda has written up the state of play
on the vote, and it’s very bad. Both left- and right-wing parties have
backed this proposal, including (incredibly) the French Front National,
whose Youtube channel was just deleted by a copyright filter of the sort they’re about to vote to universalise.
So far, the focus in the debate has been on the intended consequences of
the proposals: the idea that a certain amount of free expression and
competition must be sacrificed to enable rightsholders to force Google
and Facebook to share their profits.
But the unintended – and utterly foreseeable – consequences are even
more important. Article 11’s link tax allows news sites to decide who
gets to link to them, meaning that they can exclude their critics. With
election cycles dominated by hoaxes and fake news, the right of a news
publisher to decide who gets to criticise it is carte blanche to lie and
spin.
Article 13’s copyright filters are even more vulnerable to attack: the proposals contain no penalties for false claims of copyright ownership, but they do
mandate that the filters must accept copyright claims in bulk, allowing
rightsholders to upload millions of works at once in order to claim
their copyright and prevent anyone from posting them.
That opens the doors to all kinds of attacks. The obvious one is that
trolls might sow mischief by uploading millions of works they don’t hold
the copyright to, in order to prevent others from quoting them: the
works of Shakespeare, say, or everything ever posted to Wikipedia, or my
novels, or your family photos.
More insidious is the possibility of targeted strikes during crisis:
stock-market manipulators could use bots to claim copyright over news
about a company, suppressing its sharing on social media; political
actors could suppress key articles during referendums or elections;
corrupt governments could use arms-length trolls to falsely claim
ownership of footage of human rights abuses.
It’s asymmetric warfare: falsely claiming a copyright will be easy
(because the rightsholders who want this system will not tolerate
jumping through hoops to make their claims) and instant (because
rightsholders won’t tolerate delays when their new releases are being
shared online at their moment of peak popularity). Removing a false
claim of copyright will require that a human at an internet giant looks
at it, sleuths out the truth of the ownership of the work, and adjusts
the database – for millions of works at once. Bots will be able to
pollute the copyright databases much faster than humans could possibly
clear it.
I spoke with Wired UK’s KG Orphanides about this, and their excellent article
on the proposal is the best explanation I’ve seen of the uses of these
copyright filters to create unstoppable disinformation campaigns.
Meet the scientists behind the IBM Q quantum computing systems as they answer 50 questions, one for each qubit in IBM Q. Learn about qubits, dilution refrigerators, even the secret handshake to get into the lab. And finally get an answer to “what is quantum?”
California Assembly Needs to Know: The Whole Internet is Watching
There is good news for net neutrality coming out of California today, where two State Senators have combined their bills, SB 822 and SB 460, ahead of a key hearing this Wednesday before the Communications and Conveyance Committee. AT&T and other ISPs have been pouring money into lobbying and spreading misinformation, and were attempting to kill both bills by playing them against each other.
The combined bills leave all critical net neutrality protections intact, and if passed would set a gold standard for state-level open Internet legislation across the country. But telecom monopolies are still pushing hard to kill or water down the bills at the hearing this Wednesday, and contacts on the ground in Sacramento indicate that the committee chairman Miguel Santiago is being heavily lobbied by ISPs to do just that.
“It’s unthinkable that California Democrats would even consider weakening an extremely popular net neutrality bill in the immediate wake of the FCC’s attack on our Internet freedom,” said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, a digital rights group with more than 350,000 members in California. “The free and open Internet is essential for every social movement combating corruption and authoritarianism. California Assembly members need to listen to their constituents, small business owners, and community groups – not AT&T’s lobbyists. The whole Internet is watching.”
###
High tech lock is “invincible to people who do not have a screwdriver”
LockPickingLawyer, a
recreational lock picker, was sent a fingerprint padlock for review. He
emailed the manufacture to let them know that he’d discovered a
security vulnerability: “Upon examining the lock, I found that if you
remove the three screws, the lock falls apart. The shackle can be opened
and relocked without the owner’s fingerprint or knowledge.”
The manufacturer replied: “the lock is invincible to the people who do not have a screwdriver.”
Content associated with a radio program hosted by Stewart Dickson Thursday mornings from 8-9 on WRFU-LP FM 104.5 Urbana, Illinois
"TechKnowLedge, the voice of the Technical Working Group of the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center."
