CYBER: Regulating AI - Theresa May's Davos speech exposed the emptiness in the UK's AI strategy | WIRED UK

Theresa May's Davos speech exposed the emptiness in the UK's AI strategy | WIRED UK: "So we see the development of a British version of the Chinese model, where content is policed – “No-one wants to be known as 'the terrorists’ platform' or the first choice app for paedophiles,” May warned, threateningly – while data and metadata flow freely thanks to increased “data portability”.

Individual firms may rise and fall, but the market as a whole grows and expands.

The new Data Protection Bill, designed to mirror the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, seems designed to facilitate this brand of surveillance capitalism. " 'via Blog this'

The Russians (we)re coming to Google's territory

The Russians are coming to Google's territory - Feb. 10, 2009: "Having conquered search in Russia, Yandex is setting its sights on the U.S. The Moscow-based company is opening Yandex Labs not far from Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Volozh says he'll staff the office with 20 or so engineers to index Web pages for a Russian audience and keep abreast of technology developments that bubble up in Silicon Valley.

Volozh certainly will be going after some of the same tech superstars Google recruits, but some wonder whether Yandex has grander ambitions, including a play for some of Google's U.S. market share. One possibility: grabbing part of the growing market for image searches.

 Volozh denies that he's chasing Google. In fact, Yandex, which got its start in the late 1980s, long before Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page had even met, arguably has the superior search technology. Yandex's search algorithm is rooted in the highly inflected and very peculiar Russian language. Words can take on some 20 different endings to indicate their relationship to one another, and "while this makes the language precise," says MIT linguistics professor David Pesetsky, "it makes search extremely difficult." Google fetches the exact word combination you enter into the search bar, leaving out the slightly different forms that mean similar things.

Yandex has found a way to catch them all.

As a result, Yandex controls 56% of the search market in Russia (compared with Google's 23%), boasts an impressive two-thirds of all revenue from so-called search ads, and draws more than three billion hits a month. Last month Firefox dropped Google as its default search engine in Russia in favor of Yandex, putting Yandex on track to conquer still more of the market" 'via Blog this'

POLITICO - Brussels Playbook on Facebook, Google regulation

POLITICO - Brussels Playbook: "SHERYL LEANS IN: As part of Facebook’s new PR and policy charm offensive, COO Sheryl Sandberg will meet Commissioners Andrus Ansip, Vĕra Jourová, Dimitris Avramopoulos and Mariya Gabriel today before she heads to Davos. Here’s a headline Facebook probably doesn’t want the commissioners to read before they meet: “Cambodia’s Leader Shut Down Democracy — With A Little Help From Facebook” by Buzzfeed’s Megha Rajagopalan.

 GOOGLE BEWARE: First EU antitrust officials sanctioned Google’s shopping business. Now Yelp wants them to turn their attention to the way the search giant displays results for local queries ranging from restaurants to doctors. In Yelp’s telling, Google caused a significant fall in their traffic and hurt consumers who are not shown the best answer to their queries — resulting in them announcing the closure of their European operation in 2016." 'via Blog this'

Fairness and competition | European Commission

Fairness and competition | European Commission: "The Code of Hammurabi sets out to make sure the market works fairly by regulating the prices for things like hiring a ferryboat. Those regulations, of course, could produce mixed results. But today, we have a more refined answer to that question of how to make markets fair – an answer that includes the competition rules.

Because we know that competition gives consumers the power to demand a fair deal. To shop around to find a better price, or a wider choice of products. To seek out better quality, whatever that means to them – whether it's a more reliable car, or a social network that protects their private data better." 'via Blog this'

Germany threatens curbs on Facebook’s data use

Germany threatens curbs on Facebook’s data use: "Andreas Mundt, head of Germany’s main antitrust agency, the Federal Cartel Office, said Facebook could be banned from collecting and processing third-party user data as one possible outcome of an investigation that in December concluded the US technology group was abusing its dominant market position.

“We are blazing a trail in this case,” Mr Mundt said in an interview. “We are looking very closely at the connection between data and market dominance, data and market power, and the possible abuse of data collection.”" 'via Blog this'

Davos: Theresa May to urge tech firms to 'go further' over illegal content

Davos: Theresa May to urge tech firms to 'go further' over illegal content: "Mrs May will say: "Investors can play a vital role by considering the social impact of the companies they are investing in. They can use their influence to ensure these issues are taken seriously.

"For example, earlier this month a group of shareholders demanded that Facebook and Twitter disclose more information about sexual harassment, fake news, hate speech and other forms of abuse that take place on the companies' platforms.

"Investors can make a big difference here by ensuring trust and safety issues are being properly considered. And I urge them to do so."" 'via Blog this'

CYBER What Happened to Progressive Tech Policy? | Washington Spectator

What Happened to Progressive Tech Policy? | Washington Spectator: "Progressives gave up on democratic institutions and the rule of law. Progressives are not afraid to use the power of government to make our society fairer and more just. But when it came to the Internet firms, a new mantra of “multistakeholder engagement” took hold. Internet firms received special dispensation from legal compliance, such as disclosing political advertising sources. Companies that should have been the subject of government scrutiny instead created their own self-regulatory processes for resolving real problems like governance, privacy, and consumer protection. The fox didn’t just guard the henhouse—it designed it and wired it to the Internet with 24-7 surveillance. The chickens never had a chance. #The First Amendment was repurposed to block regulation. An odd policy inversion took hold in the progressive world. At the same time that progressive leaders were rethinking fundamental principles of free expression on college campuses, they were doubling down on First Amendment rights for large corporations. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act enacted by Congress in 1996, long before the rise of massive platform monopolies, was elevated from an early attempt to clarify case law to an armor-plated get-out-of-jail-free card for corporate behavior that should have triggered oversight and liability, such as facilitating online sex trafficking." 'via Blog this'

CYBER What Happened to Progressive Tech Policy? | Washington Spectator

What Happened to Progressive Tech Policy? | Washington Spectator: "Progressives gave up on democratic institutions and the rule of law. Progressives are not afraid to use the power of government to make our society fairer and more just. But when it came to the Internet firms, a new mantra of “multistakeholder engagement” took hold. Internet firms received special dispensation from legal compliance, such as disclosing political advertising sources. Companies that should have been the subject of government scrutiny instead created their own self-regulatory processes for resolving real problems like governance, privacy, and consumer protection. The fox didn’t just guard the henhouse—it designed it and wired it to the Internet with 24-7 surveillance. The chickens never had a chance. #The First Amendment was repurposed to block regulation. An odd policy inversion took hold in the progressive world. At the same time that progressive leaders were rethinking fundamental principles of free expression on college campuses, they were doubling down on First Amendment rights for large corporations. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act enacted by Congress in 1996, long before the rise of massive platform monopolies, was elevated from an early attempt to clarify case law to an armor-plated get-out-of-jail-free card for corporate behavior that should have triggered oversight and liability, such as facilitating online sex trafficking." 'via Blog this'

CYBER: AI - How open data can save AI – World Wide Web Foundation

How open data can save AI – World Wide Web Foundation: "One way to make more data available and to improve data quality is to push governments that use algorithms and AI systems for public service delivery to open up the data upon which these systems rely. All non-personally identifiable datasets used should be released in open formats. When datasets are considered too sensitive for release, appropriate metadata should be provided.

Opening key datasets will help identify potential biases, lead to more competition between potential service providers, ensure better public services, and increase citizen trust in government.

 As governments adopt algorithms and AI systems to improve service delivery, we should take steps to ensure this is done in a transparent way that reassures citizens that these systems will produce fair outcomes, as well as higher quality services. Making the underlying data available is a first step towards public understanding of how public service AI systems make decisions." 'via Blog this'

CYBER DCMS pass the buck on age verification - Pandora Blake

DCMS pass the buck on age verification - Pandora Blake: "Given the DCMS have taken seven months to produce their guidance, which they started before the Digital Economy Act was passed, it seems a little cheeky to expect the BBFC to turn their guidance around instantaneously. Nonetheless, enforcement is meant to begin on 27 April 2018, by which point the regulator needs to have been designated, held a consultation, and produced guidance.

The chances of site owners having any time at all to actually implement age verification by the time all this has happened seem vanishingly slim.

If the BBFC have finished their own process by then it will have been a rush job, without taking sufficient time to make age verification workable and robust. Our best hope at this stage is for the April deadline to be put back to allow time for things to be done properly." 'via Blog this'

Meltdown and Spectre: Here’s what Intel, Apple, Microsoft, others are doing about it | Ars Technica

CYBER: Meltdown and Spectre: Here’s what Intel, Apple, Microsoft, others are doing about it | Ars Technica: "Meltdown, applicable to virtually every Intel chip made for many years, along with certain high-performance ARM designs, is the easier to exploit and enables any user program to read vast tracts of kernel data. The good news, such as it is, is that Meltdown also appears easier to robustly guard against. The flaw depends on the way that operating systems share memory between user programs and the kernel, and the solution—albeit a solution that carries some performance penalty—is to put an end to that sharing.

 Spectre, applicable to chips from Intel, AMD, and ARM, and probably every other processor on the market that offers speculative execution, too, is more subtle. It encompasses a trick testing array bounds to read memory within a single process, which can be used to attack the integrity of virtual machines and sandboxes, and cross-process attacks using the processor's branch predictors (the hardware that guesses which side of a branch is taken and hence controls the speculative execution). Systemic fixes for some aspects of Spectre appear to have been developed, but protecting against the whole range of fixes will require modification (or at least recompilation) of at-risk programs." 'via Blog this'

Inside DuckDuckGo, Google’s Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor

Inside DuckDuckGo, Google’s Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor:

"DUCKDUCKGO’S SECRET WEAPON: HARDCORE PRIVACY

When you do a search from DuckDuckGo’s website or one of its mobile apps, it doesn’t know who you are. There are no user accounts. Your IP address isn’t logged by default. The site doesn’t use search cookies to keep track of what you do over time or where else you go online. It doesn’t save your search history. When you click on a link in DuckDuckGo’s results, those websites won’t see which search terms you used. The company even has its own Tor exit relay, allowing Tor users to search DuckDuckGo with less of a performance lag.

Simply put, they’re hardcore about privacy.

But things didn’t start out that way. Weinberg, who says he has “always been a privacy-minded person,” wasn’t particularly concerned with search privacy issues when he first started building the service. In fact, he knew very little about the matter at all. Then early users started asking questions." 'via Blog this'

CYBER: Public Money, Public Code

Public Money, Public Code: "Free Software gives everybody the right to use, study, share and improve software. This right helps support other fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech, press and privacy.

Do you believe that Free Software should be the default option for publicly financed software?"



'via Blog this'

CYBER More details emerge of Uber’s tactics for thwarting police raids – TechCrunch

More details emerge of Uber’s tactics for thwarting police raids – TechCrunch: "So what might be the legal implications for companies that put programs in place intended to deliberately destroy or otherwise render information inaccessible at the point it’s being sought by investigators or regulators?

“If they have knowledge of a specific investigation and a specific… search warrant… and they encrypt while that raid’s going on to stop the agents from accessing the computers that they have a court order to access that could be considered obstruction of justice,” says Josh Robbins, partner at litigation law firm Greenberg Gross LLP, discussing the risks of companies trying to thwart regulatory oversight.

 “If they were encrypting computers without knowledge of a specific investigation but encrypting computers as a security measure, just generally, I think it would be hard to make the allegation of obstruction of justice because they’d need to have knowledge of a specific investigation. It’s just a general security measure.

 “But it shouldn’t matter because if they receive a subpoena, say, or a court order to produce records then they have the obligation to use their decryption key and unlock the computers and access the information and provide it to the government — and if they refuse to do that then they would be subject to sanctions, contempt of court and so on.”

 In a civil case, a court could penalize a company for engaging in what’s known as “spoliation of evidence”, he notes" 'via Blog this'

CYBER e-Privacy proposal undermined by EU Member States - EDRi

e-Privacy proposal undermined by EU Member States - EDRi: "Although not every proposed amendment threatens fundamental rights, the Estonian Presidency proposed to broaden the scope of exceptions in significant ways. It suggested authorising some processing that goes beyond what is strictly necessary, not keeping consent as sole legal basis, and not putting up strong safeguards to limit the impact of this broadening on privacy.

This weakening of protections and predictability brings us closer to the kind of security and privacy chaos that the United States is experiencing. It would without doubt create the “chill on discourse and economic activity” that failure to implement privacy and security measures has caused in the US. But at least Facebook and Google will be happy." 'via Blog this'

CYBER: How Law and Computer Science Can Work Together to Improve the Information Society | January 2018 | Communications of the ACM

How Law and Computer Science Can Work Together to Improve the Information Society | January 2018 | Communications of the ACM: "What more can be done? Europe sets the global standards for regulation of content, notably in data protection and hate speech. The decisive power relationship in European law has swung to Germany and France. Regulation will increase, and Anglo-American companies increasingly recognize that and are embracing a French term: co-regulation. What that means is diluting government control of the Internet by ensuring a compromise based on industry self-regulation, but with oversight by users and by government regulators.

Examples include global Top Level domain name oversight. Governments have sponsored industry standards not only in Europe but globally via hosting and supporting the World Wide Web Consortium with industry.

 Co-regulation is the compromise computer scientists must live with. Totalitarian regimes want to use the threat of terrorism and cyber-crime to replace self-regulation with direct and often draconian control. Co-regulation is the best alternative.

Co-regulation is the compromise computer scientists must live with.

Areas for cooperation between law and computer science can flourish in co-regulatory institutions, because the best of them engineer a deliberative evidence-driven expert-friendly process. It can curb the worst excesses of both corporate and government control.

If lawyers and computer scientists cooperate to make these social regulation processes work, it is the best chance to prevent a much worse system of direct government control emerging."



'via Blog this'

CYBER: Res Robotica! Liability and Driverless Vehicles

SCL: Res Robotica! Liability and Driverless Vehicles: "The laws clearly assume a level of awareness of action that suggests the conscious machines sit somewhere between our traditional views of legal objects and persons. Professor Lilian Edwards and others have spoken extensively about the applicability of Asimov's laws and as part of a joint EPSRC and AHRC Robotics Retreat in 2010 proposed some 'principles for designers, builders and users of robots'[1] that are aimed at taking Asimov's rules and developing them for real world applications as well as setting out some overarching messages designed to encourage responsibility within the robotics research and industrial community.
Ten years on from the I, Robot film (and 70 from the book), robots are becoming mainstream.

This article concentrates on the development of robotic driverless road vehicles and specifically the issue of liability on the road." 'via Blog this'

CYBER: Brit transport pundit Christian Wolmar on why the driverless car is on a 'road to nowhere' • The Register

Brit transport pundit Christian Wolmar on why the driverless car is on a 'road to nowhere' • The Register: "Wolmar thinks the self-driving car is a ludicrous tech nerd fantasy, one that’s only been indulged by clickbait-chasing journalists who recycle the press releases and don’t ask tough questions. Or hardly any questions at all.

 Wolmar told us: “This is a fantasy that has not been thought through, and is being promoted by technology and auto manufacturers because tech companies have vast amounts of footloose capital they don’t know what to do with, and auto manufacturers are terrified they’re not on board with the new big thing,” he said. “So billions are being spent developing technology that nobody has asked for, that will not be practical, and that will have many damaging effects.”

It has turned out that autonomous cars are full of unexpected consequences, he says." 'via Blog this'

Commission: 120 minutes to remove illegal online content

Commission: 120 minutes to remove illegal online content: "Earlier this month, Titanic, a German satirical magazine had its Twitter account banned after poking fun at a right-wing AfD member, which poses questions on freedom of expression.

 Twitter, along with other social media platforms, now face a potential €50 million fine in Germany since the start of the year if content that violates German hate speech laws is not removed within 24 hours.

 Last September, the French ministry of interior had also ordered two Indymedia websites to remove content deemed a "provocation to terrorism".

The same content had been published in more mainstream media outlets but without recrimination from the ministry.

 But EU security commissioner King, in a tweet, said more action is needed by the companies.

"Today we discussed, with industry, the need for faster action. If possible on a voluntary basis - but, if necessary we'll look at further steps," he said.

Last year's commission's paper on illegal content, known as a communication, was widely criticised by MEPs who said its ideas on automatic detection of bad content risked undermining rule of law." 'via Blog this'