Posts

Relevant piece in light of new proposals for automatic filtering of copyrighted materials in the EU: Can Beethoven send takedown requests? A first-hand account of one German professor’s experience with overly broad upload filters.

Nice explanation by Mozilla on improvements being developed on the Domain Name Service (DNS) infrastructure, and good introduction if you don’t know how this actually works.

This article caught my attention since I saw the nice documentary on their work as well, and seems they now struggle with Youtube suspending their account: “Women on Waves’ three YouTube suspensions this year show yet again that we can’t let internet companies police our speech”.

Prescient books 🤔

Mariarosaria Taddeo and Luciano Floridi on the influence of AI on our daily lives: “As it matures and disseminates, AI blends into our lives, experiences, and environments and becomes an invisible facilitator that mediates our interactions in a convenient, barely noticeable way. While creating new opportunities, this invisible integration of AI into our environments poses further ethical issues. Some are domain-dependent. For example, trust and transparency are crucial when embedding AI solutions in homes, schools, or hospitals, whereas equality, fairness, and the protection of creativity and rights of employees are essential in the integration of AI in the workplace. But the integration of AI also poses another fundamental risk: the erosion of human self-determination due to the invisibility and influencing power of AI.”.

News from the Washington Post on how is apparently Facebook is testing with rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to 1 and lack of transparency: Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to 1.

Must read on part of history of technology of antibiotics on animals: “The discovery that Aureomycin promoted animal growth set in motion a train of unintended consequences, from antibiotic resistance to factory farming.”.

Monetization of attention and the weird children’s videos it produces.

Fifty year ago today the Prague Spring dream was crushed.

Doctoral student Corrine Cath on influence of companies on AI regulation: “A related concern is how much influence these companies have over AI regulation. In some instances, they are invited to act as co-regulators. For example, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before a joint-hearing of the US Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committee about his company’s role in the massive data breach. During the hearing, he was explicitly asked by multiple Senators to provide examples of what regulation for his company should look like.” Read more here.