I'm a huge fan of @Mer__edith . I often like to understand where people come from, but there's surprisingly little I can find from internet searches.
As far as I can tell, she got a BA in rhetoric and psychoanalytic theory (I guess Lacan or something?), and in 2006 entered the Googleplex as a CSR. 12 years later she's leading an AI-focused lab, organizes workers, and then she's testifying before Congress and running Signal.
What happened in the middle there? What happened before?
@neilk I studied Rhetoric and English Lit at Berkeley. Then Google hired me in 2006. And in 13 years I did and learned and founded a lot before leaving Google for NYU, then FTC, then Signal. There ya go?
Last week I had the honor of accepting the 2024 Helmut Schmidt Future Prize
Instead of a traditional speech, I gave this talk on the history of AI, the business of surveillance, & why the use of AI "ad targeting for killing" in Gaza should be illegal๐
@Ea5iyl And who will have the resources (without licensing them from AWS, GCP, Azure) to run these models? Or the access to markets if not via cloud monopolies/surveillance ad platforms?
Telegram is notoriously insecure and routinely cooperates with govs behind the scenes while talking a big game about speech and privacy. Even their limited opt-in (roll their own) encryption is sus. The more you know ๐
@ljrk@zenspider Open source โ contributions accepted from anyone. Open source allows people validate and examine our work. Building and maintaining usable robust high availability software is a huge amount of forever work, and requires close coordination and sustained effort. Sometimes we do accept outside contributions. But this is not a volunteer led effort nor could it be and continue to serve the many many millions of people who rely on signal for secure, private comms.
Anyone who cares about free speech & expression should be feeling cold blood in their veins as USG rushes to silence, censor, & brutalize those critical of Israel's extremist gov.
Bills like this are political weapons. Once forged, they will be wielded for much, much more.
My wife and some of her friends are heavy users of @signalapp. Three times now, she has had spam (email and/or ads, popups on other sites) start occurring for products she has only mentioned in a Signal conversation.
Enough to know it's not a coincidence.
Is Signal selling keywords to advertisers? The Mac OS text edit client?
It's not possible to understand the state of BigTech, or its pathologies at the moment, without understanding these companies' transformation into defense contractors, in addition to their central role as surveillance providers to the state. ๐
(Yes, gentlemen, I know about ARPA and the US-military origins of networked computation. But I'm sure there's someone else out there who'd love an explanation.)
This is a historic tech action in a long proud tradition.
From Polaroid workers rejecting their work contributing to S Africa's passbooks, to the MIT research strike where scientists refused to work for warfare; to Geoff Hinton relocating to Canada to avoid building US weapons.
There is almost no way the large cloud companies providing massive compute services, AI surveillance & data processing APIs aren't implicated in the system of 'ad targeting for death' being used to facilitate mass murder in Gaza.
This is a nightmare. And it's going to take significant pressure to prevent this from becoming business as usual--a selling point for oppressive regimes, as opposed to a cautionary tale.
I also recommend this fortifying history, documenting the 1969 research strike that began at MIT and spread across universities as scientists rejected the use of their work for murder and pain-bringing.
@heretical_i I am intimately familiar with the US military origins of much computing technology and have written on the topic in many places, but thank you
Hi, I like signal, but version 7.3.1 installed yesterday from playstore (via Aurora, because I have no google-ccount) seems to talk to firebaseinstallations.googleapis.com. Any idea, why ?
On how we lost the crypto wars, why surveillance advertising must be understood as the foundation of "AI", & why the tactics of the past won't serve us in defending privacy today.
I keep brooding on the way the xz backdoor was enabled in significant part via weaponizing the FOSS culture of shitty behavior and abuse.
Yes, there're other pathologies at work here (the big tech capitalist pillaging of the commons, etc).
But what is striking is that the uncool, mean standards of FOSS conduct that many of us have decried for years, & that many defended as authentic, tough, etc., ended up not just being exclusionary loser behavior, but a significant attack surface.
@eighthave eh, I mean...read the long thread of comments and you'll see many people who disagree. A shitty culture in general isn't erased by a subset of kind people operating within that culture.
