Technology

Brian Merchant and Paris Marx are back with the very first guest of System Crash: Molly White! With Molly’s help, we walk through the biggest stories in the crypto world. We explore the resurgence of crypto, how its backers influenced the election and won Trump’s favor, what the crypto industry wants from the incoming administration—and how it plans to wield power.

An Australian computer scientist who falsely claimed to be the creator of bitcoin has been given a one-year suspended prison sentence after the high court in London ruled he was in contempt because he would not stop suing people.

Mr Justice Mellor had already found that Craig Wright, 54, repeatedly lied about his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the person or people who launched bitcoin – the cryptocurrency that was first mined in 2009 and recently soared in value to £79,000.

Wright had claimed intellectual property rights associated with bitcoin, but that was demolished when the high court found he lied about his role, deploying often clumsy forgeries “on a grand scale” and “technobabble”. The real Nakamoto is likely to be a billionaire because they are thought to own 1 million bitcoins.

Wright was then ordered to stop taking legal actions against bitcoin developers, but defied that court order in October when he brought suits against cryptocurrency developers amounting to more than £900bn in respect of his claimed intellectual property rights related to bitcoin.

More than 140 Facebook content moderators have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism.

The moderators worked eight- to 10-hour days at a facility in Kenya for a company contracted by the social media firm and were found to have PTSD, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depressive disorder (MDD), by Dr Ian Kanyanya, the head of mental health services at Kenyatta National hospital in Nairobi.

The mass diagnoses have been made as part of lawsuit being brought against Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Samasource Kenya, an outsourcing company that carried out content moderation for Meta using workers from across Africa.

The images and videos including necrophilia, bestiality and self-harm caused some moderators to faint, vomit, scream and run away from their desks, the filings allege.

GUIs are certainly awesome, and they look like they’ll be the future of IT; but what if you desperately wanted one, yet all you had was a regular IBM PC? Lucky you, as Visi On was just what you needed; let’s explore it in our newest Episode of GUI Wonderland!

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/49967612

NSO competitor Paragon, creator of Graphite spyware used by Israel and U.S., sold to American defense contractor, marking a shift in ties of cyber arms between Jerusalem and D.C.

Police and intelligence services in Serbia are using advanced mobile forensics products and previously unknown spyware to illegally surveil journalists, environmental campaigners and civil rights activists, according to a report.

The report shows how mobile forensic products from the Israeli firm Cellebrite are used to unlock and extract data from individuals’ mobile devices, which are being infected with a new Android spyware system, NoviSpy.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/49891367

How cool is that?! AntennaPod creates a summary and stats of my year listening to podcasts directly on my device without sending it to the cloud!

My year 2024 in podcasts.

UPDATE: oh shit Verizon only has 5G but there's also apparently some companies called Brightspeed and GloFiber. anyone heard of them?

Hello, despite my 2 external hard disks I almost lost my data, so I decided to create a Google Cloud cold backup to store them.

Google Cloud is much more technical then a normal cloud service and I need some tips to configure it correctly to take it fully private.

I tried to create the cheapest configuration My account is:

• Single region
• "Archive" class
• "Uniform" bucket level access
• Public access: Not public

Is there anything else I should check to keep my data private? Thanks!

NEW YORK, Dec 7 (Reuters) - U.S. TikTok users spent heavily to buy merchandise from a range of vendors on the e-commerce platform TikTok Shop so far this holiday shopping season, according to TikTok estimates and a Reuters analysis of spending patterns measured by data from Facteus.

When questioned about its controversial cloud computing contract with the Israeli government, Google has repeatedly claimed the so-called Project Nimbus deal is bound by the company’s general cloud computing terms of service policy.

While that policy would prohibit uses that lead to deprivation of rights, injury, or death, or other harms, contract documents and an internal company email reviewed by The Intercept show the deal forged between Google and Israel doesn’t operate under the tech company’s general terms of service. Rather, Nimbus is subject to an “adjusted” policy drafted between Google and the Israeli government. It is unclear how this “Adjusted Terms of Service” policy differs from Google’s typical terms.

“The tenderer [Israel] has adjusted the winning suppliers’ [Google and Amazon] service agreement for each of the services supplied within the framework of this contract,” according to a 63-page overview of the Nimbus contract published to the Israeli government’s public contracting portal. “The Adjusted Terms of Service are the only terms that shall apply to the cloud services consumed upon the winning bidders’ cloud infrastructure.”

The language about “Adjusted Terms of Service” appears to contradict not only Google’s public claims about the contract, but also how it has represented Nimbus to its own staff. During an October 30 employee Q&A session, Google president of global affairs Kent Walker was asked how the company is ensuring its Nimbus work is consistent with its “AI Principles” document, which forbids uses “that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” including surveillance, weapons, or anything “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

It’s really important to point out that our own interaction with tech may have changed to be extremely controlled, and seem like we have a dependency on corporations… but the original underlying structure still exists. We have power to exist independently, and create our own alternatives too.

At the core of it, we can participate our own way, if we know where to look.
You can still create websites, your own tools, distribute your own software… and how to do that is a very important understanding to cultivate.

Tech literacy is an imperative, especially in the era that we are in right now.

Byrne joined Meta in September 2021.

She and her team helped draft the rulebook that applies to the world’s most diabolical people and groups: the Ku Klux Klan, cartels, and of course, terrorists. Meta bans these so-called Dangerous Organizations and Individuals, or DOI, from using its platforms, but further prohibits its billions of users from engaging in “glorification,” “support,” or “representation” of anyone on the list.

Byrne’s job was not only to keep dangerous organizations off Meta properties, but also to prevent their message from spreading across the internet and spilling into the real world. The ambiguity and subjectivity inherent to these terms has made the “DOI” policy a perennial source of over-enforcement and controversy.

A full copy of the secret list obtained by The Intercept in 2021 showed it was disproportionately comprised of Muslim, Arab, and southeast Asian entities, hewing closely to the foreign policy crosshairs of the United States. Much of the list is copied directly from federal blacklists like the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Global Terrorist roster.

Byrne tried to focus on initiatives and targets that she could feel good about, like efforts to block violent white supremacists from using the company’s VR platform or running Facebook ads. At first she was pleased to see that Meta’s in-house list went further than the federal roster in designating white supremacist organizations like the Klan — or the Azov Battalion.

She was also unsure of whether Meta was up to the task of maintaining a privatized terror roster. “We had this huge problem where we had all of these groups and we didn’t really have … any sort of ongoing check or list of evidence of whether or not these groups were terrorists,” she said, a characterization the company rejected.

Byrne quickly found that the blacklist was flexible. "Meta’s censorship systems are “basically an extension of the government...”