Google’s vision for the future of search shows how generative AI is all about increasing corporate power.
Instead of sending you to different websites, Google has scraped the open web to generate plagiarized answers to keep you looking at ads on Google. We need to stop being distracted by AI hype and fantasies about intelligent machines, so we can push back on the real threats before it’s too late.
NEW: WhatsApp will soon make it possible to chat with people who use other messaging apps. It's revealed some more details on how that will work.
— Apps will need to sign an agreement with Meta, then connect to its servers.
— Meta wants people to use the Signal Protocol, but also says other encryption protocols can be used if they can meet WhatsApp's standards
— WhatsApp has been testing with Matrix in recent months, although nothing is agreed yet. Swiss app Threema says it won't become interoperable
The attack on encryption in Europe is very real. We obtained a leaked document from the EU showing Spanish officials want to ban end-to-end encryption.
Beyond this, the document shows the views of 20 countries on encryption, and how it relates to a controversial proposed law that would allow companies to scan people's chats to hunt for child sexual abuse material.
The majority said they are in favour of some form of scanning of encrypted messages.
The document also reveals that a lot of countries don't appear to know how end-to-end encryption works, with many proposals being technically infeasible.
The fallout is growing from Tesla’s continued refusal to sign a collective agreement with its Swedish mechanics.
On top of the solidarity strikes, one of Denmark’s largest pension funds is selling its $58 million stake in Tesla for refusing to respect the Nordic labor model.
For years, the media built up Elon Musk and got the public to buy into the myth of his genius. Now the truth of who he is can’t be hidden and changing how they cover Musk isn’t enough.
The media failed us. They not only need to inform the public about the harms of Musk’s empire, but change how they cover the entire tech industry so another grifter can’t replicate his rise. They owe us nothing less.
Silicon Valley billionaires are drawing a line: you’re either a techno-optimist who won’t question them or an enemy they’re ready to fight.
In his new manifesto, Marc Andreessen embraces faith and fascism to distract from the harms the tech industry has caused and justify the power and wealth of the tech elite. It shows why a renewed Luddite movement is absolutely necessary.
Watch the others in the room. The assholes who jeer and manhandle the protestors. These are your peers in the tech industry. These are the “acceptable folks” in tech. Fuck these people.
Look at their faces. They know exactly what they’re complict in. Look at their smug smiles. Dickheads each one.
“Companies have been trying to hide the full footprint of their data centers because they know the public could turn against them if they knew the reality. In The Dalles, Oregon, Google was found to be using a quarter of the city’s water supply to cool its facilities. Tech companies have been facing pushback elsewhere in the United States, but also across the world in places like Uruguay, Chile, the Netherlands, Ireland, and New Zealand. Now opposition is growing in Spain too, where droughts are wiping out crops and people are wondering why they’d give their limited water resources to Meta for a data center. But adopting generative AI will require a lot more of those data centers to be built around the world.
The tech industry is constantly incentivized to increase the computing power we use as a society, because that works for their business models — especially when Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have massive cloud computing divisions. But we never seem to stop and ask whether that additional computing power is necessary to improve our lives. As Hugging Face climate lead Sasha Luccioni told The Guardian, “we’re seeing this shift of people using generative AI models just because they feel like they should, without sustainability being taken into account.” Everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon, but it’s not clear that’s actually in anyone’s interests but those of founders and investors who are hoping to cash in on the latest AI bubble.”
Microsoft is really hitting it out of the park with its AI-generated travel stories! If you visit Ottawa, it highly recommends the Ottawa Food Bank and provides a tip for tourists: “Consider going into it on an empty stomach.”
lmao, the US military keeps accidentally sending highly sensitive information to email addresses in Mali because they write .ml instead of .mil. The Dutch company managing Mali’s domain has collected 117,000 emails this year alone.
Control of Mali’s domain is about to revert to the Mali government, at which point it can collect all those emails. It’s a close ally of Russia, and could theoretically pass on information.
Perhaps the most dystopian story you will read this week. Cops used DNA to create a 3D model of a suspect's face... and then tried to run it through facial recognition software
It’s incredibly dangerous how the richest man in the world — deluded by paranoia, narcissism, and far-right conspiracies — can get arms of the state to go after his perceived enemies instead of holding him to account as they should be doing.