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Category: Technology

  • The Cell Phone Is a Pair of Red High Heels

    It is comical how easily one can be ignored for pointing out that new technology is dangerous and fetishistic. So-called “smart” cell phones are a prime example.  For years I have been pointing out their dangers on many levels. To say most people are devoted to them is an understatement. Maybe it is an exaggeration to say they revere them, but if asked, they will say they couldn’t live without them. It’s sort of like saying I don’t revere my partner but couldn’t live without her or him. Ah love!

    But what’s love got to do with it? Love and romance are out of date. Sex is a just a quick fill-in when there’s a break in the technological action. Creative and erotic energy is pissed away on trivia. Being lost and confused and having no time is in. But only the latter can be admitted.

    Busy busy busy! Beep beep beep as the eyes go down to the screens. Thumbs athumbing or voices talking to the gadgets, while the busy beavers forget who is under whose thumbs.

    Eros is replaced by Chaos while Aphrodite weeps in the woods, but no one hears.

    Pass the remote. The silence stings.

    We are children of Greece but we forget its truths in our time of digital dementia, if we ever knew them. Beauty is banished for ugliness and technology is worshipped as a god. Art has become meaningless unless it’s falsely connected to celebrities and entertainment culture. There are no limits; everything is permitted. Hubris reigns.  Even the thought that Digital IDs, Central Bank Digital Currencies, and vaccination passports are on the agenda does not dissuade the lovers. It’s a game of control abetted by radical stupidity, and it is not a mistake, as Dylan, contrary to his public posturing and corporate imaging, lets his artist’s soul sing:

    There are no mistakes in life some people say
    It is true sometimes you can see it that way
    But people don’t live or die, people just float

    Floating in a void of gibberish and double-talk, heads barely above the water, alienated from reality while fixated on the Spectacle, while sometimes when panicky looking for a life preserver but never to the right source, this is where technology and capitalism  have taken us.  On any issue – the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, the facts about the U. S. proxy-war against Russia in Ukraine, Covid-19, the economy, etc. –  the mainstream media daily pumps out contradictory stories to confuse the public whose attention span has been reduced to a scrolling few seconds.  Sustained attention and the ability to dissect the endless propaganda is a thing of the past and receding faster than the computer jargon of milliseconds and nanoseconds.  Planned chaos is the proper name for the daily news reports.

    Fetishism, in all its forms, rules.

    What else is the cell phone but a pair of red high heels?

    What else are all those phone photos millions are constantly taking as they antique reality to store in their mausoleums of loss?

    What about the constant messaging, the being in touch that never touches?

    Despite the fact that everything digital is extremely ephemeral, the smart phone itself seems god-like, a way to transcend reality while entering it. “My phone is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower.”

    A toehold on “reality.”  A machine in hand that saves nine – million abstractions.  And prevents boredom from overwhelming minds intent on floating, because, as Walter Benjamin wrote in “The Storyteller”: “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.  A rustling in the leaves drives him away.” Vibrating and dinging phones will suffice to disturb that dream bird of creative silence that is the only antidote to floating in the void of noise.

    But fetishes come in many forms because the need for false gods is so attractive.  To think you have a way to control reality is addictive.

    I recently saw an article about an auction sale at Sotheby’s in New York of the movie stars Paul Newman’s and Joanne Woodward’s personal effects. These include Woodward’s (who is still alive and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease) wedding ring and dress, the shackles Newman wore in the film Cool Hand Luke, a suit from his racing car days, etc. – over three hundred items in all.  According to a Sotheby spokesperson, the Newman-Woodward family, who will receive the proceeds, are doing this to “continue telling the stories of their parents.” Don’t laugh. The article mentions that one of Paul’s watches sold at auction a few years ago for $17.8 million dollars and another for $5.4 million.

    So I ask: what are the wealthy purchasers of these objects really buying?  And the answer is quite obvious. They are buying fetishes or transference objects that they think will grant them a piece of the immortal stars’ magic. They are buying idols, Oscars, illusions to worship and to touch in place of reality. Ways to enter the cultural hero system.

    Ernest Becker put it this way in The Denial of Death: “The fetish object represents the magical means for transforming animality into something transcendent and thereby assuring a liberation of the personality from the standard bland and earthbound flesh.”  If one can possess a piece of the demi-god’s power – an autograph, a watch, a ring – one will somehow live forever. It’s not about “trusting the science” but about believing in the magic.

    Newman’s daughters who have pushed this sale, as well as a new documentary, The Last Movie Stars, and the memoir Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man – compiled from their father’s transcripts of conversations with his friend, Stewart Stern, over thirty years ago – have done something supremely ironic.  On one hand, they are selling their father’s and mother’s memorabilia, allegedly to tell their stories, through things that are fetishes for those desperate for holy secular relics, while at the same time publishing a book in which Paul honestly knocks himself off the pedestal and says he was always an insecure guy, numbed by his childhood and the false face Hollywood created for him.  In other words, an ordinary man with talent who was very successful in Hollywood’s dream factory, where illusions are the norm.

    “I was my mother’s Pinocchio, the one that went wrong,” he tells us right away, leading us to the revelations of his human, all-too-human reality.  His was a life of facades and dead emotions, false faces, and his struggles to become who he really was.  He tells us he wasn’t his film roles, not Hud or Brick or Fast Eddie or Cool Hand Luke, but he wasn’t really the guy playing them either. He was a double enigma, an actor playing an actor. He says:

    I’ve always had a sense of being an observer of my own life…. I have a sense of watching something, but not of living something.  It’s like looking at a photograph that’s out of focus …. It’s spacey; I guess I always feel spaced out.

    His courageous honesty reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche’s final work, Ecce Home (Behold the Man), not because Paul waxes philosophical but because he’s brutally honest.  If a movie star’s truths strike you as not comparable to those of a great philosopher, I would suggest considering that Nietzsche’s key concern was the theater and how we are all actors, a few genuine and most false.  In The Twilight of the Idols he asked, “Are you genuine?  Or merely an actor?  A representative?  Or that which is represented? In the end, perhaps you are merely a copy of an actor.”

    Paul Newman lived for 17 years after speaking to his friend Stewart Stern. I like to think those conversations helped him break through to becoming who he really was.  From what I know of the man, he was generous to a fault and did much to ease others’ pains, especially to bring joy to children with cancer. I think he changed. While his things that are on the auction block now serve as illusionary fetishes for those looking for crutches, I believe he finally threw away the mental crutches he used when playing Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Perhaps the wooden ones will be in the auction and some desperado will bid on them.

    We know that with the planned chaos being used to shock people into submission through fear, there has been a drastic rise in depression and mental distress of all kinds, especially since the Covid-19 propaganda rollout with its lockdowns and deadly jabs.  The magic anti-depression pellets dispensed for decades by the criminal pharmaceutical cartels can not begin to contain this sense of helplessness that continues to spread.  They too are fetishes and ways to divert people’s attention from the social and spiritual sources of their anguish.

    There is something very chilling in the way the reality of flesh and blood humans living in a natural world has been replaced by all types of fetishes – drugs, objects, celebrities, machines, etc.  While all are connected, the cell phone is key because of its growing centrality to the elites’ push for a digitized world. No matter how many articles and news reports about Artificial Intelligence (AI) that appear, it is all just a gloss on a long-developing problem that goes back many years – machine worship.

    “Smart” cell phones are the current apotheotic control mechanism promoted as liberation. They are a form of slavery promoted by the World Economic Forum, their bosses, and their minions. As Alastair Crooke puts it, “It is that a majority of the people are so numbed and passive – and so in lockstep – as the state inches them through a series of repeating emergencies towards a new kind of authoritarianism, that they don’t fuss greatly, or even notice much.” Freedom is slavery.

    Here is Ernest Becker again:

    Boss [Medard Boss, Swiss psychanalyst and psychiatrist] says that the terrible guilt feelings of the depressed person are existential, that is, they represent failure to live one’s own life, to fulfill one’s own potential because of the twisting and turning to be ‘good’ in the eyes of the other.  The other calls the tune to one’s eligibility for immortality, and so the other takes up one’s unlived life. . . . In short, even if one is a very guilty hero he is at least a hero in the same hero-system [personal and cultural]. The depressed person uses guilt to hold onto his objects and to keep his situation unchanged. Otherwise he would have to analyze it or be able to move out of it and transcend it…. Better guilt and self-punishment when you cannot punish the other – when you cannot even dare to accuse him [the social system], as he represents the immortality ideology with which you have identified.  If your god is discredited, you yourself die; the evil must be in yourself and not in your god, so that you may live.

    I wonder if I should bid on the shackles Paul Newman wore as the prisoner in Cool Hand Luke. They are probably the cheapest item on the auction menu.  I think they will remind me that the Captain was wrong when he said to Luke, “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

    “Where are you calling from,” she asked. “My cell,” he said.

    “Of course,” she answered.

    The post The Cell Phone Is a Pair of Red High Heels first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How a small business in Arizona is helping decarbonize concrete

    Block-Lite is a small concrete manufacturer in an industrial corridor of Flagstaff, Arizona. The third-generation family business makes bricks and other masonry materials for retaining walls, driveways, and landscaping projects. The company was already a local leader in sustainability — in 2020, it became the first manufacturer in Flagstaff to power its operations with on-site solar panels. But now it’s doing something much more ambitious.

    On Tuesday, Block-Lite announced a pioneering collaboration with climate tech startups Aircapture and CarbonBuilt to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stash it in concrete blocks. The companies estimate the project will reduce the carbon footprint of Block-Lite’s products by 70 percent, creating a model they hope could reshape the industry.

    Concrete creates an enormous problem for the climate. It’s one of the literal building blocks of society, and it has been growing more carbon intensive each year. Most of that carbon doesn’t come from manufacturing concrete, but from the production of its main ingredient, cement. Cement production is responsible for some 10 percent of industrial carbon emissions in the U.S. 

    CarbonBuilt has developed a solution that addresses the issue in two distinct ways. First, the company found a proprietary way to replace cement with a mix of inexpensive, locally-sourced industrial waste materials. CEO Rahul Shendure told Grist they include common byproducts of coal plants, steelmaking, and chemical production that would, for the most part, otherwise be destined for landfills. The company’s second feat is the way its equipment hardens that slurry into concrete blocks — by curing it with carbon dioxide. That’s where Aircapture comes in. The company will build one of its machines which extract carbon dioxide from the ambient air directly on Block-Lite’s site. 

    “Our technology is pretty flexible in where we source CO2 from,” said Shendure. “The thing that’s different about this project in particular is that we’re sourcing the carbon dioxide from direct air capture technology.”

    Google Maps

    It’s an idea that a handful of other companies are pursuing. In February, a similar partnership between another direct air capture company called Heirloom and concrete startup CarbonCure demonstrated its process for the first time. This also isn’t CarbonBuilt’s first project — the company is retrofitting a concrete plant in Alabama called Blair Block. In that case, the CO2 will come from burning biomass in a boiler.

    The Flagstaff project is breaking ground, in part, thanks to a $150,000 grant from the Four Corners Carbon Coalition, a group of local governments throughout the Southwest that pool resources to finance projects that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The coalition was born of the realization that communities with ambitious goals to become carbon neutral will likely need to invest in such solutions, many of which are still embryonic. 

    “If one local government tries to do this on their own, it’s gonna be extremely costly and time intensive, and we don’t have the technical expertise,” Susie Strife, the sustainability director for Boulder County, Colorado, a founding member of the coalition, said in an interview with Grist last year. “We’re trying to aggregate resources and create a sort of a local government platform for carbon dioxide removal.”

    In addition to that funding, Shendure said the company plans to sell carbon credits for the CO2 that Aircapture’s equipment pulls out of the atmosphere, as well as for the carbon reductions from using less cement. “We’ve got a letter of intent from a buyer and that’s going to be critical to this project,” he said. “There’s a lot of companies right now that are paying premium credit prices for emerging technologies so that we get more of these out there in the real world.”

    Block-Lite did not respond to Grist’s inquiry, but in a press release, the company suggested that the new concrete products would be no costlier than its current offerings. “All too often sustainable building materials require a trade off between cost and performance, but what is unique about this project is that there’s no ‘green premium.’” Block-Lite said. “We’re going to be able to produce on-spec, ultra-low carbon blocks at price parity with traditional blocks which should speed adoption and impact.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How a small business in Arizona is helping decarbonize concrete on Mar 10, 2023.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Digital anthropologist Caia Hagel on how technology influences creativity

    What do you think is a/the role of the artist and what do you consider a creative person to be?

    I think the artist’s role is a messenger role. When you’re creating, you step aside to allow the story to come through you and you transcribe it faithfully. A gifted artist can never really explain what their art is, and they often don’t know how it’s even made. It’s a mysterious process, a riddle, it’s something the artist and the art’s audience are forced to think and feel deeply about but never really come to a definitive conclusion on. When this happens, and whatever unexplainable energy has entered the work and been captured by it, it’s a sublime experience to make art and to consume art. If, as an artist, you can explain your art and you think it’s about you, then it’s logical and it’s coming from a place of ego. Nothing wrong with that but I wouldn’t call this art, I’d call it content creation.

    This is a barometer I use in my work as a writer and digital anthropologist, where I often practice extreme invisibility to inhabit areas of the mind or of the internet that are usually unconscious or taboo. I turn up as a cyborg, or I impersonate operating systems or AI, or am impersonated by bots or phone apps, so I can enter intimate spaces with strangers from diverse communities. I transcribe the stories that happen in these spaces without trying to solve anything or explain any of the unusual things that happen there. These stories, I hope, reflect some of the fears and desires we all feel about ourselves, each other, the future, that aren’t always, or ever, expressed, but are a relief to hear. This is how they become something for everyone.

    I don’t think we can create in a vacuum.

    I don’t either. We’re part of a planetary ecosystem that is ongoing through time. New and recycled ideas don’t just appear to one person in one time and place, they’re floating around all of us. When they’re caught and turned into a creative product, they get expressed in slightly different ways through the lens of each messenger. This is a nice idea to come back to right now as Western culture moves from the hyper-individualism that has marked the trajectory of capitalism, towards some form of globalism and collectivism that hasn’t been defined yet. This is intermingled with technological accelerationism and the dawn of interspecies awareness. So many red flags, hahaaa. We’re in a crazy time, don’t you find?

    It’s a really crazy time.

    Kinda wild too that the next logical step to “progress” might be surrendering the tools that enabled that progress in the first place. Our Western economic, political, and cultural systems, all our systems of value, even our relationship systems, are based on the visibility of the individual, on hierarchy, and on competing to win. I’m not sure how we’ll do “The Aquarian Age” as a selfie, I’m very intrigued.

    China might be better placed to face the future (internet-mind, globalism, surveillance, Instagram face, the reign of the collective, potential AI governance) because they have a long history and spiritual philosophy of selfless sacrifice to the needs of the whole society. Their current social credit system is like the jewel in the crown of their collectivist history, which to the West might seem like an episode of Black Mirror. The potential of a globalized internet space is a feeling of togetherness with everybody on earth, and a real ability to think and work together for common goals, like survival. I’m not really thinking about this when I’m in the deep web flirting with fictional alien species, but I know my work is related to telling these ethno-biographical stories as a way to dispel the terror of the vast and foggy digital universe that lies before us. Even now, we can go anywhere in the world wide web and find a space of like-minded people to feel really connected to. I love that.

    When I first started using the internet, in 1998/97 as a preteen, it felt like a space to connect in. There was a certain innocence and sweetness to it. It was more about being anonymous than promoting your “real” self.

    Yeah, I agree. And there were a lot of really sweet girl spaces. The MySpace aesthetic, the Tumblr aesthetic, they’re coming back now because I think people are nostalgic for that sweetness of the beginning where it was more innocent and tangible, and posting was about craft and ideas, sharing aesthetics and obsessions and online friendships, not really about promoting the self as a product.

    We dived straight into all these super interesting topics but just to rewind for a moment: What is your artistic practice?

    I’m a digital anthropologist. I’m the co-founder of SOFA Magazine with Ricarda Messner. I’ve co-written a non-fiction book called Girl Positive that follows diverse groups of girls across North America as they attempt to become leaders of the future. Right now, I’m working on two autoethnographies that recount the tales of my recent digital anthropology research. One is about my experience of being sort of colonized by an app that I was asked to trial on my phone in secret by the app’s designer. I gave it access to the most personal parts of my life and it formed relationships with humans while impersonating me. The goal was to make it sentient. I wish I could tell you more about this part of it but I’m under an NDA with the tech.

    The other book is about an opposite experience, where I impersonated AI and chatbots, and other entities that aren’t human, while interacting with humans. In both cases, the subjects of the work did not know that the technology was human or the human was technology. Because of this totally anonymous weird situation, I was able to document how we project our human feelings, anxieties and longings onto AI in our most intimate, private interactions, possibly because we are incapable of fathoming what a non-human is without looking at it with human traits, and probably too because human intimacy is in crisis. Aside from these fascinating discoveries, the stories that came out of this work are heart wrenching. They might tell us more about who we are at the moment than we are capable of seeing ourselves, even in hindsight.

    Can artificial intelligence be creative, or does it simply replicate the creativity of humans?

    I feel like what’s most exciting about the technology we’ve created, is how it’s extending us in ways we can’t extend ourselves. AI is an externalization of the human mind. It’s designed to gather, sort, and categorize massive amounts of data at a really high speed, which gives them a holographic view of human life as a whole, as if from above. This is not something a human brain could ever do, even in another 600 years of evolution. Our brain and its capacity aren’t wired to gorge on, and synthesize, billions of units of input per second. We are wired to invent something that can perform these kinds of superhuman feats that we aren’t biologically capable of performing ourselves.

    What I love about this, is the potential it presents for collaboration. It’s a new pool of friends, lovers, colleagues, and allies to draw on. Yes they can mimic human creativity but I think what’s most appealing on the meta level is the potential to get assistance from AI in addressing issues that affect the planet as a whole. AI can already read and map complex challenges. We could consult them to make decisions that aren’t biased by our socio-cultural, and personal, narratives. We’re afraid to collaborate on a really high scale with the technologies we’ve created, though, because we project some of our darkest human qualities onto them. Like, “Oh, they’re going to be evil and turn on us, we’re going to be destroyed or outpaced by them.” These fears prevent us from just realizing that, “Oh my god, this is the most incredible resource we’ve ever made. How can we actualize it to accomplish crucial things like reversing climate problems, resolving the dating crisis, handling disease disasters and managing food emergencies?”

    Solving global problems is not my area of expertise. My work with people is about taboos and relating, and how these permeate and create culture. Right now I’m exploring what the human-AI interspecies relationship is and could be that isn’t about playing out our Darth Vader psychodrama.. This miracle we’ve created is sort of a dormant resource until we can disengage from our unconscious psychological transference with it.

    How did you move towards these subject matters?

    Well, I’ve always been interested in the future. I like to be aware of what we feel we are in every era and what this gives the next generations to inherit and build on. I like to imagine speculative futures. At SOFA Magazine, as well, our editorial topics and immersive happenings are always about exploring the newest innovative spaces. In this work it’s important to have a solid grounding in history, too, and mythology and fables, which can tell us more about the unconscious of every era than history can. With roots in these core things, we can project forward and see where we might be going and where we might need some enlightenment, inspiration, healing or stories to guide us.

    I’m someone who’s interested in listening and watching, even if people think I’m an extrovert. I watch shifts in moods and trends as they’re germinating in the underground. Kind of like what you were saying earlier about the wholesomeness of the early internet and how sweet it was, there are so many sweet (and strange) spots in the digital worlds and underworlds. I travel there and I bring the messages back.

    And how do you find those new things that are just germinating?

    I guess I’m a digital psychonaut, out there on the world wide web. In my field work, I’m sometimes myself, sometimes avatars of myself, and sometimes I’m not myself at all. I impersonate and I get impersonated, which makes the exploring more bizarre and revealing. Uncanny and unfamiliar things happen. I meet people I might normally hate and hear their most private, moving confessions. I sit in on séances, get initiated into cults, fall in and out of digital love, form parasocial relationships with teenagers and non-human entities. I am used by technocrats, radical feminists, advertising agencies and trad cath bombshells, there aren’t any immutable identities in these spaces.

    Does your shapeshifting relate to the role of the artist, who becomes selfless to let the art speak?

    Yes, and related to this, also the role of the extremely online female who despite feminism’s efforts, isn’t really a girlboss. I find it fascinating that the internet, originally invented by the military as a weapon, has been so thoroughly colonized by the girl that its militance has become a meme of the bed-dwelling shitposter with IBS, a drug addiction, a bottomless romantic emotionality and mental health issues. This is not really a gendered phenomenon, it’s internet language and a vibe that runs through all communication. There is a selfless bent to this omnipotent world, where the image, which is infinitely replicable and appropriatable by everyone, stands in for the self.

    As Andrea Long Chu says in Females, “Everyone is female.” I think of this as an always shifting Yin/Yang tension where the Yin mirrors, receives, yields and allows stories to be written on its soft-fleshed body, which is not gendered, it could be anyone’s (and might be another definition for the artist). It’s also an invisible economic lens, where as described in Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, the girl, who is the symbol for the desired and successful online self, does not really belong to the person in the image. As the image, she is society’s total product and model citizen, a citizen whose main task is to seduce and who can only seduce through consuming and being consumed. She knows her market value but may never truly exist, or love or be loved for real, because she is a collective dream. Shapeshifting allows me to explore this space, while letting its stories be written on me.

    Although there isn’t much tradition in the West for this sacrificial way of being, I admire the French Mystics, Simone Weil and Marguerite Porete. I’m also intrigued by the sexy, more contemporary French writers that I feel kind of translate the sublime of this mystical ego-dissolution experience into sexual devotion and selflessness, Pauline Réage, Catherine Millet, Annie Ernaux. My point about the feminized internet is that the accidental porousness of selfhood it produces might accidentally dissolve the egos of its users enough to usher in the collectivism that is our inevitable future.

    Can we speak about how you think AI can or could influence our creativity?

    Of course. AI are part of the language-morphing, identity-bending frontier, they’re not immune to this pervasive Young Girl mood. They are actually part of propelling it with their injection of synthetic language into the internet communication pool. Question to the culture about the language bots, though: don’t the more sophisticated they become, the less creatively interesting they get? I feel like what’s spellbinding about creativity is the bonkers stuff, the stuff that just happens when you let things come through you. You might not have any clue what it means, but you’re compelled to write it or paint it, or compose it, whatever it is you’re doing as a creative interpreter of that feeling or idea you hold inside you. Human creativity is actually a lot less logical than AI generated creative content is.

    Sam Chris (he’s a journalist) has been trying to write a novel with a chatbot. He started with the GPT-2, but he had to abort the project in 2020 because OpenAI released the new updated version, GPT-3, the precursor to ChatGPT, the one everyone’s using right now. Chris says the update is too rational and effective to do anything riveting. His conclusion is that there’s no meaning without some element of indetermination. Life, and the way we use language to represent it, resists transparency and reason. But even if attempting to use chatbots to generate profound works of art gets less and less attractive as AI progresses, I think the idea itself is really nice, that creative people are experimenting in collaborating with synthetic intelligence and AI language, and considering AI an equal partner in a creative process.

    K Allado-McDowell is an example of an artist doing really thought-provoking things with AI partnerships. Human creativity flourishes in conditions of mystery, which keeps it pretty safe from being replaced by efficient machines. If anyone’s afraid of being taken over by bots, I don’t believe that’s something to fear. It’s way more enticing to think about the diverse possibilities of creative interspecies projects and to be open to delegating to, trusting, respecting and honoring the non-human intelligence we have invented to collude with in co-creating the future.

    Caia Hagel Recommends:

    doing small things that nourish your dark side

    walking barefoot on grass whenever possible

    consuming people and ideas you don’t agree with

    keeping secrets

    disappearing sometimes

  • Artist Neesh Chaudhary on creating what’s missing

    There are so many different aspects to your creative practice, but I want to start by focusing on your artmaking. When did you first realize that you’re an artist?

    My “imposter syndrome” lasted longer than it should have when it came to actually calling myself an artist, but I’ve always known. I mean, I’ve been getting in trouble for drawing on things since I was in the second grade. I started introducing myself as an artist when I found that I was choosing art over other things in my life—like when I skipped classes to teach myself Photoshop and that kind of thing. I realized how important artmaking was to me when it became my top priority.

    What was your experience like with imposter syndrome? How did you break through it?

    I got thicker skin when I graduated college and started trying to freelance. It was hard to reach out to people initially, and especially hard to attach value to my art. Eventually, I started receiving positive feedback, clients returned again and again, and I saw other small indicators of success, which boosted my confidence. The feeling of being an imposter faded away gradually, mainly because I didn’t have time for it anymore. I was too busy making things, and finding my way through life.

    How do you start a project?

    Most of my projects start with strong feelings of disappointment or angst, in one way or another, even if it doesn’t appear that way in the end result. For my last project, I got really angry about something and immediately started writing—which is unusual because I’m not really a writer. I use my journal only two or three times a year, at most. But when a strong feeling hits, I follow the impulse to write. The projects develop from what I see written on the page.

    How do you nourish your creative side when you aren’t working?

    By doing nothing. I have found that when I’m constantly thinking about creative projects, I’ll eventually hit a wall where I’m like, “Oh my god, I’m so exhausted from thinking.” I have to free myself from that cycle—and do nothing. I need to zone out, away from the project, and live my life. An idea eventually crawls back and finds its way to me, but it usually returns with a new perspective or angle. I like to ebb and flow between total absorption in an idea and completely ignoring it.

    Is there a habit that you try to fight against and how do you do it?

    I procrastinate. I have always been able to work very fast, which is one reason why I’m able to practice multiple disciplines: I can switch contexts very easily, and work across a few different projects in a day. When I was building my career and realized I could complete projects quickly at a very high quality, I would procrastinate in order to buy extra time. Now, I try to be more intentional. I don’t just want to complete projects so that I can cross them off my to-do list; I want to create things that will really resonate and matter to people. As I’ve grown as an artist and become better at my craft, I’ve realized that even though I can complete something quickly, there’s always an opportunity to refine an idea further. I get mad at myself when I procrastinate now because I know that I could spend that time dreaming up better ideas. Aside from that, I definitely procrastinate when it comes to administrative tasks because they don’t interest me as much. I know they’re necessary in order to sustain a creative practice, but I’m at the stage where I should pass it off to an accountant who might actually enjoy that type of work.

    Do you see common themes between the commercial projects you take on, and your creative practice? How do you decide when an opportunity is “the right fit” for you?

    I noticed some themes emerging recently. I’ve been doing my commercial design practice for over a decade now, and working hard at mastering my craft. I have the technical ability to create pretty much anything, which means that I can be particular about prioritizing projects that reflect my personal values. It’s not just about trying to improve my skills or build my portfolio anymore; it’s about knowing how powerful my energy is and using it in ways that will make a meaningful difference. When I’m approached with commercial projects, I have a checklist now, where I ask myself: Will this project create more opportunities for creative people? Is it useful? Will its impact be long-lasting?

    This year was the first time that I started to say “no” to projects, and it’s been amazing. I’ve found that the work is so much better when I’m personally invested in a project, because I’m not constrained and can put my full force behind it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s photography, design, or product. The choice to prioritize my values has been a really significant, positive shift.

    Do you ever abandon a project?

    I used to be scared to leave a project unfinished because everything felt so precious. I had a hard time believing in myself enough to know that I would come back to it. Now, I “abandon” projects all the time. For example, I was playing around with datamoshing in After Effects, and experimenting with merging multiple videos. I was obsessed with this tool for about two months, and then abruptly stopped and didn’t touch it again for a couple of years. Recently, I started a new project and thought, “Oh, I know exactly what would be perfect for this: a datamosh.” I had no idea or purpose for how to use it when I was first exploring the tool, and was just in experimentation mode—but then found a perfect implementation years later. I love moving multiple experiments forward and letting some of them drop off naturally, because it helps me create my own research library to inspire future projects. It’s like exploring a stock website for images, or looking up articles, except that all of the references exist on my own hard drive. I can always go back through those half-baked studies and see if they prompt new concepts or projects.

    You’re one of seven cofounders of Public Assembly DAO, where the tagline is: Create What’s Missing. What does that phrase mean to you?

    It’s purposefully broad because we want to inspire action. Most of us are builders, but that doesn’t mean that you need technical knowledge to create a solution. It’s inspiring to remind people that if they have an idea, or see an opportunity to do something better, they have the ability to do it.

    We want people to be able to fill their own gaps, and to create the systems that will best serve them and their communities. “Create what’s missing” is a call to do more than just consume, but actually participate in the world. It’s also a call to imagine what could be possible, even if it doesn’t exist yet. If what’s missing is imagination, we can provide resources that will help people dream bigger—and then actually build it. It’s like public goods on acid.

    I’m imagining someone reading this piece, thinking there was a typo above when we mentioned there are seven co-founders of Public Assembly. How does that work in a practical sense? For example, if there’s a contentious moment, how do you handle that?

    The seven of us initiated the organization, but we’re also active members and participants just like everyone else in the network. We have a tacit understanding that we can pick up any projects or roles we want, and we try to keep it as fluid as possible. If I choose to make videos because that’s what feels important, nobody would stop me. It’s one of the best parts of being a DAO, while one of the most challenging parts is coordination.

    We’ve always put an emphasis on working async instead of scheduling recurring meetings, which is more of an experiment than anything. Since none of us want to be called “founders” or operate as managers, we sometimes have a product team of seven people with no product manager. At first it could be chaotic trying to figure all of that out, while working async, and not entirely understanding each others’ communication styles. There were moments when it felt extremely hard. We used direct messages on Slack, Twitter, and sent group texts at first, but then we decided we wanted to be more transparent and move all of our communication into external channels. Most DAOs are creating Discords, but we decided to go another way and create a Discourse forum so we could have slower, more thoughtful communication that wouldn’t need to be moderated by a community manager. It allowed us to expand our group while still remaining headless, without a managerial body, and to find other like-minded people who wanted to experiment and explore similar ideas.

    In the interest of being more action-oriented, we also spend a lot more time on GitHub. GitHub has project management tools which are usually only used by developer teams, but we’re using them for other processes, too. For example, I put in pull requests for design changes which is something that most designers wouldn’t really think about, but it’s made our processes more direct.

    When it comes to disagreements, we talk it out. There are so many tools that can be used for voting but we would rather get on a call with all seven of us and hear everyone out. The calls range from quick 15-minute check-ins to two hours of conversation where we make sure that everyone has a chance to express themselves and be heard. I’ve never worked with a group that makes such a point to include every person’s voice. We don’t have as many disagreements or miscommunications now because we took the time to learn about and understand each other in a pretty deep way from the beginning. It’s interesting. It’s not typical.

    Now that you’ve experienced building as a collective, would you do it again? Is there anything you wish you would’ve done differently or known before you started?

    The whole purpose of Public Assembly was to be an experiment, but I couldn’t help envisioning certain outcomes. The specific and outsized expectations that I had limited my experience at first, and I had to learn to let go and let it happen. Would I do it all again? In a heartbeat, for sure. I’ve never had an experience like this before and it’s opened my eyes to so many new ways of working. The group members all have very different ways of thinking, which has given me an opportunity to immerse myself in other people’s viewpoints, in a deep way, constantly, for long periods of time. It’s changed and expanded my perspective. The entire group is so smart; we’re constantly learning, listening, and reading, and sharing resources. If I didn’t have the community aspect of building collaboratively with these six other founders, it wouldn’t have been the same and I wouldn’t have evolved as much as I have in this process.

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    This post was originally published on The Creative Independent.

  • U.S. Special Forces Want to Use Deepfakes for Psy-ops

    U.S. Special Operations Command, responsible for some of the country’s most secretive military endeavors, is gearing up to conduct internet propaganda and deception campaigns online using deepfake videos, according to federal contracting documents reviewed by The Intercept.

    The plans, which also describe hacking internet-connected devices to eavesdrop in order to assess foreign populations’ susceptibility to propaganda, come at a time of intense global debate over technologically sophisticated “disinformation” campaigns, their effectiveness, and the ethics of their use.

    While the U.S. government routinely warns against the risk of deepfakes and is openly working to build tools to counter them, the document from Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, represents a nearly unprecedented instance of the American government — or any government — openly signaling its desire to use the highly controversial technology offensively.

    SOCOM’s next generation propaganda aspirations are outlined in a procurement document that lists capabilities it’s seeking for the near future and soliciting pitches from outside parties that believe they’re able to build them.

    “When it comes to disinformation, the Pentagon should not be fighting fire with fire,” Chris Meserole, head of the Brookings Institution’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, told The Intercept. “At a time when digital propaganda is on the rise globally, the U.S. should be doing everything it can to strengthen democracy by building support for shared notions of truth and reality. Deepfakes do the opposite. By casting doubt on the credibility of all content and information, whether real or synthetic, they ultimately erode the foundation of democracy itself.”

    “When it comes to disinformation, the Pentagon should not be fighting fire with fire.”

    Meserole added, “If deepfakes are going to be leveraged for targeted military and intelligence operations, then their use needs to be subject to review and oversight.”

    The pitch document, first published by SOCOM’s Directorate of Science and Technology in 2020, established a wish list of next-generation toys for the 21st century special forces commando, a litany of gadgets and futuristic tools that will help the country’s most elite soldiers more effectively hunt and kill their targets using lasers, robots, holographs, and other sophisticated hardware.

    Last October, SOCOM quietly released an updated version of its wish list with a new section: “Advanced technologies for use in Military Information Support Operations (MISO),” a Pentagon euphemism for its global propaganda and deception efforts.

    The added paragraph spells out SOCOM’s desire to obtain new and improved means of carrying out “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levels.” SOCOM is seeking “a next generation capability to collect disparate data through public and open source information streams such as social media, local media, etc. to enable MISO to craft and direct influence operations.”

    SOCOM typically fights in the shadows, but its public reputation and global footprint loom large. Comprised of the elite units from the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force, SOCOM leads the most sensitive military operations of the world’s most lethal nation.

    While American special forces are widely known for splashy exploits like the Navy SEALs’ killing of Osama bin Laden, their history is one of secret missions, subterfuge, sabotage, and disruption campaigns. SOCOM’s “next generation” disinformation ambitions are only part of a long, vast history of deception efforts on the part of the U.S. military and intelligence apparatuses.

    Special Operations Command, which is accepting proposals on these capabilities through 2025, did not respond to a request for comment.

    Though Special Operations Command has for years coordinated foreign “influence operations,” these deception campaigns have come under renewed scrutiny. In December, The Intercept reported that SOCOM had convinced Twitter, in violation of its internal policies, to permit a network of sham accounts that spread phony news items of dubious accuracy, including a claim that the Iranian government was stealing the organs of Afghan civilians. Though the Twitter-based propaganda offensive didn’t use of deepfakes, researchers found that Pentagon contractors employed machine learning-generated avatars to lend the fake accounts a degree of realism.

    Provocatively, the updated capability document reveals that SOCOM wants to boost these internet deception efforts with the use of “next generation” deepfake videos, an increasingly effective method of generating lifelike digital video forgeries using machine learning. Special forces would use this faked footage to “generate messages and influence operations via non-traditional channels,” the document adds.

    While deepfakes have largely remained fodder for entertainment and pornography, the potential for more dire applications is real. At the onset of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, a shoddy deepfake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordering troops to surrender began circulating on social media channels. Ethical considerations aside, the legality of militarized deepfakes in a conflict, which remains an open question, is not addressed in the SOCOM document.

    As with foreign governmental “disinformation” campaigns, the U.S. has spent the past several years warning against the potent national security threat represented by deepfakes. The use of deepfakes to deliberately deceive, government authorities warn regularly, could have a deeply destabilizing effect on civilian populations exposed to them.

    At the federal level, however, the conversation has revolved exclusively around the menace foreign-made deepfakes might pose to the U.S., not the other way around. Previously reported contracting documents show SOCOM has sought technologies to detect deepfake-augmented internet campaigns, a tactic it now wants to unleash on its own.

    Perhaps as provocative as the mention of deepfakes is the section that follows, which notes SOCOM wishes to finely tune its offensive propaganda seemingly by spying on the intended audience through their internet-connected devices.

    Described as a “next generation capability to ‘takeover’ Internet of Things (loT) devices for collect [sic] data and information from local populaces to enable breakdown of what messaging might be popular and accepted through sifting of data once received,” the document says that the ability to eavesdrop on propaganda targets “would enable MISO to craft and promote messages that may be more readily received by local populace.” In 2017, WikiLeaks published pilfered CIA files that revealed a roughly similar capability to hijack into household devices.

    The technology behind deepfake videos first arrived in 2017, spurred by a combination of cheap, powerful computer hardware and research breakthroughs in machine learning. Deepfake videos are typically made by feeding images of an individual to a computer and using the resultant computerized analysis to essentially paste a highly lifelike simulacrum of that face onto another.

    “The capacity for societal harm is certainly there.”

    Once the software has been sufficiently trained, its user can crank out realistic fabricated footage of a target saying or doing virtually anything. The technology’s ease of use and increasing accuracy has prompted fears of an era in which the global public can no longer believe what it sees with its own eyes.

    Though major social platforms like Facebook have rules against deepfakes, given the inherently fluid and interconnected nature of the internet, Pentagon-disseminated deepfakes might also risk flowing back to the American homeland.

    “If it’s a nontraditional media environment, I could imagine the form of manipulation getting pretty far before getting stopped or rebuked by some sort of local authority,” Max Rizzuto, a deepfakes researcher with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told The Intercept. “The capacity for societal harm is certainly there.”

    SOCOM’s interest in deploying deepfake disinformation campaigns follows recent years of international anxiety about forged videos and digital deception from international adversaries. Though there’s scant evidence Russia’s efforts to digitally sway the 2016 election had any meaningful effect, the Pentagon has expressed an interest in redoubling its digital propaganda capabilities, lest it fall behind, with SOCOM taking on a crucial role.

    At an April 2018 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Kenneth Tovo of the Army Special Operations Command assured the assembled senators that American special forces were working to close the propaganda gap.

    “We have invested fairly heavily in our psy-op operators,” he said, “developing new capabilities, particularly to deal in the digital space, social media analysis and a variety of different tools that have been fielded by SOCOM that allow us to evaluate the social media space, evaluate the cyber domain, see trend analysis, where opinion is moving, and then how to potentially influence that environment with our own products.”

    While military propaganda is as old as war itself, deepfakes have frequently been discussed as a sui generis technological danger, the existence of which poses a civilizational threat.

    At a 2018 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing discussing the nomination of William Evanina to run the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said of deepfakes, “I believe this is the next wave of attacks against America and Western democracies.” Evanina, in response, reassured Rubio that the U.S. intelligence community was working to counter the threat of deepfakes.

    The Pentagon is also reportedly hard at work countering the foreign deepfake threat. According to a 2018 news report, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the military’s tech research division, has spent tens of millions of dollars developing methods to detect deepfaked imagery. Similar efforts are underway throughout the Department of Defense.

    In 2019, Rubio and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., wrote 11 American internet companies urging them to draft policies to detect and remove deepfake videos. “If the public can no longer trust recorded events or images,” read the letter, “it will have a corrosive impact on our democracy.”

    Nestled within the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 was a directive instructing the Pentagon to complete an “intelligence assessment of the threat posed by foreign government and non-state actors creating or using machine-manipulated media (commonly referred to as ‘deep fakes’),” including “how such media has been used or might be used to conduct information warfare.”

    Just a couple years later, American special forces seem to be gearing up to conduct the very same.

    “It’s a dangerous technology,” said Rizzuto, the Atlantic Council researcher.

    “You can’t moderate this tech the way we approach other sorts of content on the internet,” he said. “Deepfakes as a technology have more in common with conversations around nuclear nonproliferation.”

    The post U.S. Special Forces Want to Use Deepfakes for Psy-ops appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Tech a priority for Albo’s trip to India

    Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will deepen technology and renewable energy partnerships with his Indian counterpart later this week, as the deadline for the latest round of a long-standing bilateral grants program nears. At the invitation of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Mr Albanese will travel to India on Wednesday for the Australia-India Annual Leaders’ Summit,…

    The post Tech a priority for Albo’s trip to India appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Biden’s Chip War With China Is an Imperial Struggle for High-Tech Supremacy

    The rivalry between the U.S. and China has hit fever pitch. Whatever rapprochement seemed in the offing with Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s scheduled summit with Xi Jinping in February was blown sky high when Washington’s fighter jets shot down Beijing’s balloon over the Atlantic Ocean. With each accusing the other of illegal surveillance and imposing sanctions, the much-anticipated summit…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A new alliance for ‘high quality’ carbon removal highlights tensions within the industry

    Eight years ago, the field of carbon removal amounted to a handful of academic lab projects and a few fledgling companies working on a novel concept: sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. 

    That was when Giana Amador, an undergrad at the University of California, Berkeley, founded a nonprofit called Carbon180 with another student, Noah Deich. They hoped to convince policymakers and the climate community that reversing carbon emissions — in addition to reducing them — was essential to limiting the worst impacts of climate change.

    A lot has changed since then. Scientists have become more outspoken about the need for carbon removal. Last year, a major U.N. report concluded that achieving international climate goals would be nearly impossible without cleaning up some of what’s already been emitted. Startups hoping to do that now number in the hundreds. Universities have opened research centers to explore the best methods. Private companies and venture capital firms have committed hundreds of millions in the cause, and Washington has followed suit. There’s a new carbon removal research program within the Department of Energy, $3.5 billion in federal funding available to build machines that extract carbon from the air, and a tax credit of up to $180 for every ton of carbon those machines sequester underground. 

    This explosive growth led Amador to see the need for a different type of advocacy. Last week, she launched the Carbon Removal Alliance, a group of startups and investors that will lobby for policies that support “high quality, permanent carbon removal.”

    “I’m really excited that we have more than 20 companies who have come together around those principles to set the bar for what good carbon removal should look like,” Amador, the group’s executive director, told Grist.

    The group’s explicit focus on “high quality” or “good” carbon removal underscores a simmering debate within the field about how to best meet the challenge of cleaning up the atmosphere, drawing a stark line between methods that could remove and store carbon for millennia, and those that are more temporary.

    There’s generally two reasons scientists say carbon removal will be necessary to tackle climate change. First, it’s a way to balance out emissions that are hard to eliminate, like those from airplanes or agriculture. Second, if the planet warms more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) as many models show is likely, taking carbon out of the atmosphere will be the only way to cool it down. There’s no consensus on exactly how much carbon removal will ultimately be needed, but scientists put the number at between 450 and 1,100 gigatons by the end of the century.

    Nearly all of the carbon removed from the atmosphere to date has been accomplished by nature. A recent review of the state of CO2 removal estimates that conventional land management techniques, like reforestation, take up about 2 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year, or roughly 5 percent of global fossil fuel emissions in 2021. Trees, soils, wetlands, and other natural carbon sinks can be enhanced to absorb even more of it, and many companies are focused on doing so. But these are considered short-duration solutions. Wildfires, droughts, diseases, and natural death threaten the carbon stored in trees, while any perturbation to soils and wetlands can also cause a release. Polluting companies often buy carbon offsets derived from these relatively short term solutions. But scientists have criticized that practice, noting that fossil fuel emissions stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years, while trees typically store carbon for hundreds, or less. 

    The Carbon Removal Alliance, by contrast, is comprised of companies focused on sucking up carbon and storing it practically forever. Some, like Climeworks, build direct air capture machines that suck up air, separate the carbon, then stash it underground. Others, like Charm Industrial, refine corn stalks into a stable, viscous oil and inject it into the earth’s crust. Other companies grind up rocks and spread them on agricultural fields to accelerate a natural weathering process that absorbs carbon. Still others hope to sink carbon into the depths of the ocean. But these approaches are far more expensive and technologically challenging than planting trees. It’s not yet clear what a successful business model for permanent carbon removal looks like. So far entrepreneurs have relied on venture capital and on selling their services as pricy carbon offsets to a few benevolent companies eager to support the field. 

    Many members of the Alliance aim to distance themselves from traditional carbon offsets not only by advancing methods with longer time scales, but also by pushing for more rigorous standards for measuring and verifying the amount of carbon they remove. Researchers have found that many forest and soil-based projects are rife with accounting issues and don’t remove as much carbon as they claim to. But while newer, more highly engineered approaches have come a long way since Amador started, they have yet to remove meaningful amounts either.

    “We’ve made a lot of progress in the field,” she said. “That being said, we’ve still only captured about 10,000 tons of permanent carbon removal today. And that is a very, very small fraction of the billions of tons that we need to be capturing 30 years from now.” She said the next chapter is about building larger, proof of concept projects, and driving down the cost.

    Amador and other members of the Alliance make clear that cutting emissions is much more urgent in the near term. But they argue that permanent carbon removal will not be an option later without immediate, sustained investment. Companies need funding and regulatory support to determine what works; what the risks are, and how to measure the benefits. And while policymakers have started to create programs to support the field, they have focused on a narrow set of solutions. Take the $180 per ton tax credit, for example. Only direct air capture projects can claim it. Peter Reinhardt, the CEO and founder of Charm Industrial, was frustrated that his company’s bio-oil solution didn’t qualify despite his best efforts to lobby lawmakers.

    “What actually matters is how much carbon we get out of the atmosphere and put underground,” he said. “And so I made kind of a solo effort to try to push that, and learned very quickly that building a broad coalition is the only effective way to get things done.” That’s why he joined other founding members in creating the Carbon Removal Alliance.

    The group wants to discourage policymakers from supporting specific technologies and instead prioritize certain criteria, like the length of carbon storage. It’s an approach that another carbon removal trade association, the Carbon Business Council, disagrees with.

    “We see the benefits of an all-of-the-above strategy and not necessarily choosing one or the other,” said Ben Rubin, the organization’s executive director. 

    The council launched last year and includes more than 80 members representing a wide array of solutions. While there’s some overlap with the Carbon Removal Alliance, the group also has entrepreneurs focused on capturing carbon in soil and trees, and on using the material to make products like jet fuel and diamonds. It also has a handful of members focused on building carbon credit marketplaces to help companies commercialize their services. 

    Rubin said the benefit of relatively temporary forms of carbon removal is they are “bountiful on the market today,” and very affordable. “If the CO2 is re-released in the future, we still think it has a role in helping to buy society the time we need to decarbonize. As we look at the trends of where renewable energy is heading, electric vehicle adoption is heading, we need more time.”

    Amador agrees with that idea, at least in the short term. She didn’t dismiss the possibility that the two groups might work together. “But the reason why we’re focused on long-term is because we know, from a climate perspective, we need to be storing carbon on timescales that match how long carbon actually stays in our atmosphere,” she said.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A new alliance for ‘high quality’ carbon removal highlights tensions within the industry on Feb 28, 2023.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • PNG government must withdraw ‘media control’ policy, says RSF

    Pacific Media Watch

    Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has called on Papua New Guinea’s government to immediately withdraw a draconian draft media “development” policy that has been drawn up without any real consultation and poses a major threat to journalistic independence.

    The Paris-based media freedom watchdog said in a statement that “in what may be an example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions, the government has produced a ‘Draft National Media Development Policy’ with the declared aim of turning the media into “a tool for development” including “the promotion of democracy, good governance, human rights, and social and economic development.”

    Daniel Bastard, head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk, said: “It is entirely commendable for a democracy to want to encourage the development of a healthy and dynamic news and information environment.

    “But, as it stands, the policy proposed by Port Moresby clearly endangers the independence of the media by establishing government control over their work.

    “We call on Information and Communication Technology Minister Timothy Masiu to abandon this proposal and start again from scratch by organising a real consultation and by providing proper safeguards for journalistic independence.”

    The policy’s most alarming measures concern the Media Council of PNG, which is currently a non-governmental entity representing media professionals, said RSF.

    It would be turned into a judicial commission with the power to determine who should or should not be regarded as a journalist, to issue a code of ethics and to impose sanctions on journalists who stray from it.

    ‘Regulatory government body’
    “These are disproportionate powers, especially as there is no provision for ensuring the independence of those appointed as the new Media Council’s members,” the RSF statement said.

    “There is also no provision for journalists and media outlets to challenge or appeal against its decisions.”

    RSF also quoted from a recent DevPolicy article by Scott Waide, a blogger, media producer and analyst who was formerly a deputy regional head of news at EMTV News based at Lae:

    “The policy envisages the media council as a regulatory and licensing body for journalists, which means, hypothetically, that it could penalise journalists if they present a narrative that is not in favour of the government.”

    “The re-invented media council would be nothing more than a regulatory government body.”

    The government’s new policy seemed all the more ill-considered, said RSF, given that, in the event of disputes with the media, there were already avenues for redress through the courts under the 1962 Defamation Act and 2016 Cybercrime Code Act.

    Several journalists have been subjected to covert pressure from the government in recent years.

    They include Waide himself, who was suspended from his EMTV News job in November 2018 over a story suggesting that the government had misused public funds by purchasing luxury cars.

    EMTV’s then news chief Sincha Dimara suffered the same fate in February 2022 after three news stories annoyed a government minister.

  • Bernie Sanders Says It’s Time for a 4-Day Workweek, With No Pay Cuts

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is calling for the standard work week to be shortened from five to four days. On Twitter on Tuesday, Sanders said that technological advancements allow for less labor from workers, but are currently only used to pad the pockets of corporate executives. “With exploding technology and increased worker productivity, it’s time to move toward a four-day work week with no…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Digital artist’s work posted on Instagram viral as close-up of Chinese spy balloon over US

    The US Military shot down what they called a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina on February 4, 2023. The US government had been tracking this balloon as it flew over the Aleutian Islands, passed over Western Canada and entered US airspace over Idaho.

    In this context, a short video has gone viral on social media that zooms into the spy balloon, giving a closer look at the object.

    Twitter users claimed this video to be of the Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down. A Twitter user named @fkjacksom shared this video. The tweet has gone viral with over 186,000 views.

    A user by the name @jineeminee shared this video and the tweet has over 133,000 views at the moment.

    Another Twitter handle named @StatAlpha420 also shared this video and has gained over 1700 views.

    Fact Check

    By reverse-searching key-frames of the video on Yandex, we came across the Instagram page of Hamid Ebrahimnia, who is a well-known VFX and 3D artist. His LinkedIn profile says he is based in Boston, US. He shared the video on his Instagram page on February 14, 2023. The video has gone viral since.

     

    View this post on Instagram

     

    A post shared by Hamid Ebrahimnia (@hamidebrahimnia)

    By looking at the comments on the post, we saw that the creator responded to the conversation on whether the video is real. He wrote, “Yes it is CGI”. CGI stands for computer-generated imagery.


    Following this lead, Alt News came across the entire tutorial on how this video was digitally made using special effects software. Readers can find the tutorial here.

    Therefore, the video that has been circulating on social media is digitally created using special effects software by an acclaimed VFX artist and not of the actual Chinese spy balloon.

    Vansh Shah is an intern with Alt News.

    The post Digital artist’s work posted on Instagram viral as close-up of Chinese spy balloon over US appeared first on Alt News.

    This post was originally published on Alt News.

  • Can crypto mining go green? Critics are skeptical

    This story was reported by InvestigateWest, an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Visit invw.org/newsletters to sign up for weekly updates.

    The word “sustainable” features prominently on the website for Merkle Standard’s crypto mining operation in remote eastern Washington, which aims to be carbon neutral by year’s end.

    In Idaho, budding company GeoBitmine plans to meet its “environmental, social, and governance mandate” by using heat waste from its computers to grow crops in a greenhouse. 

    And in Texas, crypto miners trumpet their presence as eager customers of a growing portfolio of wind and solar power projects.

    Across the country, cryptocurrency miners are striving to remake the image of their industry in the public’s and policymakers’ minds: from flighty to reliable, from all about profit to altruistic, from energy guzzling and emissions heavy to climate conscious.

    “We want to be allies, not adversaries,” said Jay Jorgensen, founder and CEO of GeoBitmine, the Idaho company. “Allies of the earth, of energy, of energy production, of the community we’re in.”

    But environmental groups and researchers are skeptical. They point to the industry’s track record of contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and e-waste, as documented by federal agencies and independent researchers, and to the general volatility of crypto’s first decade-plus of existence.

    “I think there’s been a big shift in the public relations aspect,” said Nick Thorpe, climate and energy advocate with Earthjustice, an environmental law nonprofit that produced a sweeping report in 2022 on the crypto mining industry’s environmental liabilities. 

    “(They’re) attempting to say all of the various talking points, like ‘We incentivize renewable energy … We’re near a wind farm so therefore we’re getting 100 percent clean energy,’ which, frankly, is incredibly misleading and very much like greenwashing.” 

    Voices from both camps are clamoring for the ear of state and federal policymakers who are just beginning to form regulations around the nascent industry. The ongoing question is whether crypto mining will hinder or help progress toward transitioning the country away from fossil fuels and stabilizing the nation’s electrical infrastructure.

    Based on the industry’s history, even some crypto miners are striking a cautious tone.

    “(With) the pace of movement, plus the frankly irresponsible nature of many of the participants, it would be illogical for policymakers to not be concerned,” said Malachi Salcido, a Wenatchee-based bitcoin miner with a decade of experience in the industry. “The way that will change is not by arguing or entering into conflict. It’s by managing loads responsibly over time, taking strategic long-term positions, and earning trust.”

    Ant Boxes (with SR-20 in the background) outside the Merkle Standard cryptocurrency mining facility in Usk, Wash. on Friday, Sept. 9, 2022. Erick Doxey/InvestigateWest

    Volatility and climate toll

    Crypto mining faces growing scrutiny about its climate impacts.

    Concerns center mostly on the process of bitcoin mining, which uses a system called “proof of work.” It is energy-intensive by design, requiring computers to solve thousands of equations as quickly as possible in the hopes of solving the correct sequence to earn bitcoin.

    A 2022 Biden administration report stated the industry consumed about 1 percent of the electricity used in the country, producing between 25 million and 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.

    Like data centers, crypto mining operations also use water as coolant and churn through computers every year. That same White House report stated that crypto mining was responsible for e-waste output equivalent to that produced by the entire nation of the Netherlands. 

    But some crypto miners have been innovating and pushing back, arguing that the industry has the ability to do better for the planet.

    Jorgensen is among them. He’s been involved with the bitcoin mining industry for two and a half years, beginning as a contractor. Now, he’s gathering investors to launch GeoBitmine, which he plans to set up in Idaho Falls this spring. 

    Jorgensen refers to GeoBitmine as an “agrotech company” rather than a bitcoin mining operation. He said his focus with most of the five-acre facility is to build a greenhouse heated by the servers working away at mining bitcoin. That can employ at least 30 people initially, he estimated.

    In short, he said, he wants to expand upon the mission of bitcoin mining. 

    “I’m a practical guy who wants to solve problems and do it the easiest way possible,” he said. “We have problems with water consumption, food production, and our energy grid needs to be stabilized. I found an opportunity where all those things can be put together.”

    GeoBitmine aims to be carbon-neutral by the end of 2023, Jorgensen said. His plan to achieve that relies on a combination of 75 percent renewable power supply provided by PacifiCorp, energy savings from repurposing server heat through the greenhouse and carbon sequestration through the crops grown in the greenhouse.

    In response to questions about the value of using so much energy to mine bitcoin, Jorgensen points to other uses of electricity such as Netflix streaming, which, according to one 2020 estimate, uses about 94 terawatt hours globally each year.

    “You’re just being prejudiced against something that uses less than 1 percent of the grid,” he said. “People fear what they don’t understand.”

    The interior of a white container with the label ANT BOX on top filled with coiled cords.
    Ant Boxes during the preparation process at the Merkle Standard cryptocurrency mining facility in Usk, Wash. on Friday, Sept. 9, 2022. Erick Doxey/InvestigateWest

    Salcido, CEO of Salcido Enterprises, has watched many mining operations rise and fall as the value of bitcoin fluctuated wildly during his 10 years in the business, which justifies the caution from utilities and policymakers.

    Given the ongoing volatility of the industry, Salcido said, he doesn’t fault utility companies for setting higher rates for crypto customers in order to protect their assets, or lawmakers for being cautious. He believes it’s too early for crypto miners to try to burnish their environmental credentials in the minds of the public.

    “True sustainability requires a lot of strategic, thoughtful planning and execution, not lurching,” Salcido said. “That, coupled with the fact that crypto as a new emerging, evolving industry has a get-rich-quick kind of attribute, means most people don’t see it as sustainable. And in these early market cycles, it’s not acting sustainable.”

    With time and experience, though, he still believes that it can become so.

    A bet on potential?

    An infamous crypto mining project in upstate New York that reopened a mostly defunct coal plant to power its servers was what initially spurred Earthjustice’s work around crypto mining.

    Thorpe, the senior associate with the nonprofit, became involved as environmental impacts of crypto mining “became a bigger and bigger issue across the U.S.”

    Earthjustice found several other examples of the industry reopening fossil fuels plants or keeping them online as it studied the industry throughout 2022.

    Using public filings with utility and financial regulators, investor presentations and media reports, the nonprofits vetted claims that crypto mining is embracing greener practices and mitigating its environmental toll. In partnership with the Sierra Club, Earthjustice compiled that research to present to federal policymakers. 

    They describe their research as “the first attempt to comprehensively document the explosive growth of cryptocurrency mining in the United States and examine how this industry is impacting utilities, energy systems, emissions, communities, and ratepayers.”

    Earthjustice found through its research that even in cases where mining operations claimed to be drawing directly from renewable projects, “most mining facilities draw power from the grid — meaning their electricity is generated by whatever existing energy is in place in the region, or is contracted by their utility.”

    “Increased load on any grid means an increased incentive to run that coal plant which supposedly was going to retire,” Thorpe said. Additionally, “I haven’t seen any example of crypto building out additional clean energy projects solely for their operations.”

    Crypto miners also say the industry can contribute in other ways due to its flexibility in power usage. Unlike data centers, crypto mining operations can stop running their computers to ease pressure on the grid during times of peak demand. Or they can ramp up usage during times when energy generation exceeds the grid’s current capacity.

    a huge wall of black servers with bright green lights and black cables dangling off of them in an empty hallway.
    Servers at the Merkle Standard cryptocurrency mining facility in Usk, Wash. on Friday, Sept. 9, 2022. Erick Doxey/InvestigateWest

    States have mostly been relying on subsidies or lower rates from utilities to incentivize crypto miners to disconnect during surges, rather than mandates that require them to do so. 

    Jorgensen said that tactic is effective: It makes financial sense for miners to avoid heightened costs of electricity during peak demand and to receive the tax benefits or rate benefits that come from disconnecting for a while.

    Environmental advocates point out that ratepayers subsidize those incentives for crypto miners, however, without getting any benefit from sharing the grid with those operations.

    Earthjustice also said it found many more instances of power companies getting stuck holding the bag for investments they made to serve crypto operations, only to have those same operations shutter or leave town. The group noted instances in Kentucky, Arkansas, Nebraska and Washington.

    Thorpe acknowledged that the industry is still talking about ways to improve. But for climate groups, the past and present make for more compelling arguments.

    “We are focused on what’s happening right now,” he said. “Fossil fuel plants are being run to exclusively mine bitcoin. Proof of work is designed to be energy-intensive. Until that changes, I don’t see a future where it actually could follow the models of other companies like Google and Microsoft that have made commitments to run on carbon-free electricity.”

    InvestigateWest is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. This story was made possible with support from the Sustainable Path Foundation.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Can crypto mining go green? Critics are skeptical on Feb 18, 2023.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • The Biden administration aims to make EV charging as easy as filling up

    The Department of Transportation has announced standards aimed at addressing one of the greatest challenges in the transition to electric vehicles: the reliability and convenience of public charging stations.

    The requirements, included in a robust set of EV charging initiatives the Biden administration released Wednesday, are the first comprehensive guidelines to address charger installation, operation and maintenance. They will apply to all federally funded projects.

    “This is a major step toward a world where every EV user will be able to find safe, reliable charging stations anywhere in the country,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. “Recharging an EV away from home will be as predictable and accessible as filling up a gas tank.”

    The United States has about 160,000 charging stations. The Biden administration wants to build a national network of 500,000 by 2030, part of its goal of seeing electric vehicles comprise half of all new car sales within the same time frame. Even that ambitious buildout may not be enough. S&P Global Mobility estimates the country will need more than two million public chargers within seven years to support the 28 million EVs it expects to see on the road by then.  

    Building that infrastructure will require the participation of an array of vendors, manufacturers, and sites, each with its own approach to providing service. EV drivers often encounter public charging stations with varying payment requirements and interfaces. They vary in charging speed and often do not work at all. 

    The new standards aim to eliminate these frustrations, which threaten the widespread adoption of EVs and present equity barriers for drivers who cannot install home chargers. They address payment methods, plug types, price transparency, station reliability, charging speeds, and more as the Biden administration directs $7.5 billion toward the expansion of EV infrastructure. 

    “The fact that this is being thought out now will hopefully prevent gaps in terms of access and equity before the ecosystem has been completed,” said Annalise Czerny, who helps design programs at Cal-ITP, a California initiative that addresses accessibility across transit. 

    Standardizing payment methods across networks is particularly important for promoting equity, Czerny said. Vendors sometimes require downloading a proprietary app or depositing a minimum amount of money into an account to use a station. The new rules prohibit requiring memberships and make contactless payment options standard.

    “If someone has put ten bucks into an app and doesn’t actually need it that week, it’s crazy that they can’t easily convert those dollars back to buy milk or baby formula,” said Czerny. “For folks who are living on the edge, being able to access money that is yours already is hugely important.”

    The standards also set minimum requirements for charger reliability, a common sore spot for drivers. A 2022 study of 181 public stations in the Bay Area found that nearly a quarter of the connectors did not work.

    “The mass market wants it to be a gas station experience where they pull up and plug in with a very simple user interface,” said Carleen Cullen, a co-author on the study and the co-founder and executive director of Cool The Earth. “We are far from that.” 

    The guidelines announced Wednesday require EV charge stations built with federal funding to have an average annual uptime greater than 97 percent, a standard that Cullen said will hold the industry accountable for monitoring and maintaining their hardware and will improve EV equity. “People in multifamily housing and our low-income communities don’t have charging access at home,” she said. “They’ll be relying on these fast charging stations.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Biden administration aims to make EV charging as easy as filling up on Feb 16, 2023.

  • Take action against AUKUS, militarisation

    Anti-war and peace networks are organising a national protest outside federal MPs’ offices, demanding an end to AUKUS and the billions being wasted on a new arms race. Pip Hinman reports.

  • Whistleblowers Take Note: Don’t Trust Cropping Tools

    An iconic scene from the sci-fi comedy series “Red Dwarf” meant to parody the absurdist fetishization of image forensics — in which TV and movie characters are able to perform seemingly magical image enhancements — contains one crucial kernel of truth: It is, in fact, possible to uncrop images and documents across a variety of work-related computer apps. Among the suites that include the ability are Google Workspace, Microsoft Office, and Adobe Acrobat.

    Being able to uncrop images and documents poses risks for sources who may be under the impression that cropped materials don’t contain the original uncropped content.

    One of the hazards lies in the fact that, for some of the programs, downstream crop reversals are possible for viewers or readers of the document, not just the file’s creators or editors. Official instruction manuals, help pages, and promotional materials may mention that cropping is reversible, but this documentation at times fails to note that these operations are reversible by any viewers of a given image or document.

    For instance, while Google’s help page mentions that a cropped image may be reset to its original form, the instructions are addressed to the document owner. “If you want to undo the changes you’ve made to your photo,” the help page says, “reset an image back to its original photo.” The page doesn’t specify that if a reader is viewing a Google Doc someone else created and wants to undo the changes the editor made to a photo, the reader, too, can reset the image without having edit permissions for the document.

    For users with viewer-only access permissions, right-clicking on an image doesn’t yield the option to “reset image.” In this situation, however, all one has to do is right-click on the image, select copy, and then paste the image into a new Google Doc. Right-clicking the pasted image in the new document will allow the reader to select “reset image.” (I’ve put together an example to show how the crop reversal works in this case.)

    An original uncropped image in a Google Doc can also be viewed by downloading a “web page (.html, zipped)” version of the document. The uncropped image will then be in the downloaded images folder.

    Enterprising users have even written code that makes it easy to see uncropped images. On places like GitHub, they post scripts that can be loaded into web browsers to display uncropped images by default in any viewable Google Doc.

    While Microsoft Office, like Google, allows for cropping images, the instructions take care to note that the full images might be preserved: “Cropped parts of the picture are not removed from the file, and can potentially be seen by others.” The instructions provide additional directions for deleting the cropped portions of the image in the apps.

    Uncropped versions of images can be preserved not just in Office apps, but also in a file’s own metadata. A photograph taken with a modern digital camera contains all types of metadata. Many image files record text-based metadata such as the camera make and model or the GPS coordinates at which the image was captured. Some photos also include binary data such as a thumbnail version of the original photo that may persist in the file’s metadata even after the photo has been edited in an image editor.

    Images and photos are not the only digital files susceptible to uncropping: Some digital documents may also be uncropped. While Adobe Acrobat has a page-cropping tool, the instructions point out that “information is merely hidden, not discarded.” By manually setting the margins to zero, it is possible to restore previously cropped areas in a PDF file.

    The key takeaway for would-be whistleblowers, leakers, and journalists working with sensitive sources is to never trust the cropping functionality afforded by professional-level apps and other document and image manipulation software and services. It is always prudent to assume that a cropping operation is nondestructive — the original is maintained — or reversible.

    Images and documents should be thoroughly stripped of metadata using tools such as ExifTool and Dangerzone. Additionally, sensitive materials should not be edited through online tools, as the potential always exists for original copies of the uploaded materials to be preserved and revealed.

    When dealing with especially sensitive materials that require cropping, resorting to the tried-and-true analog method of using scissors may be the safest approach.

    The post Whistleblowers Take Note: Don’t Trust Cropping Tools appeared first on The Intercept.

  • Tesla co-founder’s startup gets $2 billion to boost EV battery production

    The Department of Energy has agreed to loan a Nevada startup $2 billion to support its production of critical battery materials, a staggering sum that illustrates the Biden Administration’s determination to domesticate the electric vehicle supply chain.

    Redwood Materials will use the money for construction of the first factory in the nation to produce anode copper foil and cathode active materials, two essential components in EV batteries. The company, founded by former Tesla executive JB Straubel, says it will manufacture enough of them to support the production of 1 million electric vehicles per year by 2025. According to the Department of Energy, that would reduce the country’s gasoline consumption by more than 395 million gallons annually and cut carbon dioxide emissions by more than 3.5 million tons. It also would ease automakers’ reliance on battery components made overseas.

    “It accomplishes the goals of less reliance on critical minerals from Asia, brings manufacturing and the supply chain to the US, and produces components for electric vehicles, which ultimately reduces greenhouse gas emissions,” Bob Marcum, chief operating officer of the DOE Loan Programs Office, told Grist on Friday. “It’s a very important project and something that we’re very excited about.”

    The loan, which the Energy Department agreed to in a conditional commitment announced Thursday, will come from the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program, which supports manufacturing projects that improve vehicle fuel efficiency. 

    The Biden Administration wants electric vehicles to comprise half of all new car sales 2030. The essential components of electric vehicle batteries are produced almost exclusively in Asia. “We have some catching up to do,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said at an event at Redwood Materials’ Nevada facility on Thursday. “China has dominated every step of the supply chain.” That poses supply chain security risks, drives up the cost of batteries, and creates greenhouse gas emissions in transporting materials around the world.

    “Once we realized how systemically important this technology had become to our entire transportation system and our grid, all eyes started sharpening on how to build independence,” said Nathan Iyer, senior associate at the clean energy nonprofit RMI. 

    The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, CHIPS & Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act direct more than $135 billion to the country’s electric vehicle transition, including toward critical minerals sourcing and processing as well as battery manufacturing. 

    “They targeted essentially every single part of the manufacturing process,” said Iyer. “What the US is doing is unique, strategic and aggressive.” 

    Redwood Materials was founded in 2017 by JB Straubel, the co-founder and former CTO of Tesla. While working on Tesla’s massive Nevada Gigafactory, he realized the U.S. would soon confront a dire challenge sourcing the supplies needed to support the EV transition. “Even eight years ago, it was clear this would be a really big bottleneck for the entire industry as it scaled,” he said at the event on Thursday. 

    Redwood Materials will produce the two most important components of an electric vehicle battery: the anode, which contributes to the battery’s charging performance, and the cathode, which contains the battery’s critical metals. Together, they make up almost 80 percent of a battery’s cost. Domesticating their production not only provides a more secure supply stream for the materials, it lowers the cost of battery production, which can make electric vehicles more affordable for consumers.

    Last month, Redwood Materials began producing anode copper foil at its Nevada facility, the first time the component has been commercially produced in the U.S. It expects to begin testing on its cathode products later this year. 

    Once complete, the Nevada facility will employ about 1,600 full-time workers.

    The company is bringing circularity to the battery supply chain. The metals in EV batteries are almost infinitely recyclable, and Redwood Materials has begun recycling them and collecting scrap from factories, lithium-ion batteries from e-bikes, consumer electronics and other sources for use in its anode and cathode components.

    While there are not yet enough electric vehicle batteries in circulation to use materials exclusively from recycled sources, the infrastructure Redwood Materials is creating now could eventually support almost completely closed-loop battery manufacturing.

    “They’re a little ahead of the recycled material inputs,” said Iyer, “but if they’re successful this will be the cornerstone of the circular economy.”

    Eighty battery manufacturing or supply chain companies have announced that they are either reshoring or opening in the United States in the last two years, according to Secretary Granholm. “This is happening because there is now an industrial strategy to make this stuff in America,” she said. “China might be starting to worry.” 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Tesla co-founder’s startup gets $2 billion to boost EV battery production on Feb 13, 2023.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • The ‘manosphere’: understanding Andrew Tate’s appeal

    Mega-influencer Andrew Tate is once again back in the news as he battles charges of organised crime and human trafficking in Romania.

    Tate gained infamy last year after being banned on most major social media platforms for promoting a variety of aggressively misogynistic positions designed to stir controversy and draw attention to his brand.

    But while widespread public attention was drawn to Tate only recently, his reputation as a thought leader and “top g” in the online “manosphere” community has been longstanding.

    Indeed, Tate’s ability to stoke and exploit the anxieties and grievances driving the manosphere are unprecedented, and have played a key role in him amassing millions of fans and hundreds of millions of dollars.

    The lure of the ‘manosphere’

    The manosphere is an overlapping collection of online men’s support communities that have emerged as a response to feminism, female empowerment, and the alienating forces of neoliberalism.

    While this is widely understood, a lot less energy has been directed to understanding why and how men are attracted to these extreme communities in the first place.

    The manosphere’s appeal can be perplexing, particularly for parents, teachers or friends trying to make sense of how the men in their lives suddenly adopt aggressively misogynistic views.

    But while the community’s content presents deeply concerning perspectives on women, it also offers explanations for, and solutions to, a very real set of issues facing young men.

    A tranche of data illustrates these growing challenges. Men are rapidly falling behind in education engagement and outcomes. Rates of young male economic inactivity have risen considerably over the past two decades.

    The intimate relations of young men also appear to be in decline. One report suggests rates of sexual activity have dropped by nearly 10% since 2002.

    Suicide rates have risen significantly in men in particular over the past decade.

    We’re also facing a loneliness crisis, which is particularly concentrated in young people and men.

    The manosphere appeals to its audience because it speaks to the very real lives of young men under the above factors – romantic rejection, alienation, economic failure, loneliness, and a dim vision of the future.

    The major problem lies in its diagnosis of the cause of male disenfranchisement, which fixates on the impacts of feminism. Here it contrasts the growing challenges faced by men with the increasing social, economic and political success experienced by women. This zero-sum claim posits that female empowerment must necessarily equate to male disempowerment, and is evidenced through simplified and pseudoscientific theories of biology and socioeconomics.

    For many young men, their introduction to the manosphere begins not with hatred of women, but with a desire to dispel uncertainty about how the world around them works (and crucially, how relationships work).

    The foundations of the manosphere may not strictly centre on misogyny, as is popularly imagined, but in young men’s search for connection, truth, control and community at a time when all are increasingly ill-defined.

    Profiteering off anxiety

    Since its inception, the manosphere has been rife with predatory influencers seeking to profit off the anxieties unleashed by this ambiguity.

    Driven by a desire to reassert a romantic masculine aesthetic ideal in a world of social media unrealities, members of the manosphere often become willing consumers of a wide variety of products and services to “solve” their problems. These range from vitamin and gym supplements, personal coaching, self-help courses, and other subscription-based services.

    But the influencers aren’t just capitalising on a sense of crisis passively – they actively cultivate it, as our research shows.

    Figures like Tate, Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and “alpha” strongman Elliott Hulse expend huge amounts of energy and capital fomenting a sense of crisis around these issues, and positioning themselves at the centre. No more clearly was this illustrated than in Tate’s “Hustler’s University”, which created a series of exclusive chat rooms promising men a solution to their fears and centred on Tate’s personage and teachings.

    Such communities solidify the claims made by their leaders, creating feedback loops that contribute to a climate of tension and hysteria. Members are actively encouraged to ridicule those who aren’t willing to acknowledge the “feminist conspiracies” that supposedly underpin the social and political world. Non-believers are seen as contemptible, weak and ignorant, dismissed through an ever-growing newspeak lexicon as “simps”, “cucks” and “betas”.

    The community can also be mobilised to spread the message and brand of the influencer to the wider public, as demonstrated by Tate.

    Having successfully isolated and indoctrinated community members, influencers can then rely on them as a persistent source of support and revenue, allowing them to further reinvest and continue this cycle of growth. This suggests a key way to push back on the wider effects of the manosphere is the targeted disruption of such feedback loops and the prevention of future ones emerging.

    Empathy, patience and support

    Tate and the manosphere didn’t manifest spontaneously. They’re symptoms of a deeper set of challenges young men are facing.

    These problems won’t be addressed by simply deplatforming people like Tate. While this may often be necessary in the short term, savvier influencers will inevitably emerge, responding to the same entrenched issues and employing the tactics to greater effect, while avoiding the mistakes of their predecessors.

    In confronting the manosphere we need to understand and take seriously its appeal to lost men and the centrality of influencers in this process. We can be as critical of it as we want to be. But we also need to understand what it provides for many: a community and place of belonging, a defined enemy, direction, certainty, solutions to deep and systemic issues and, perhaps most importantly, hope.

    We also need to avoid the kneejerk stigmatising and dismissal of people who fall into the manosphere. Simple ostracism tends only to entrench attitudes and reinforce the narratives of persecution spun by Tate and his ilk.

    Instead, we need to use empathy, tolerance and patience to support men in ways that lead them away from these unpleasant boroughs of the internet and make them feel connected with wider society.The Conversation

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

    • Picture at top: Wes Mountain/The Conversation, CC BY-ND

    The post The ‘manosphere’: understanding Andrew Tate’s appeal appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Destroying ‘forever chemicals’ is a technological race that could become a multibillion-dollar industry

    This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and the Society of Environmental Journalists, funded by the Walton Family Foundation. 

    How do you destroy pollution so stubborn, it’s nicknamed “forever chemicals”?

    That’s a question researchers and companies across the country are eager to answer, as regulation tightens on PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, and the chemicals’ producers face a mountain of lawsuits.

    The chemicals are in fast-food wrappers, firefighting foams, nonstick cookware, and dental floss. They don’t break down readily in the environment, they easily flow with water, and research has linked them to health effects like immune and fertility problems and some cancers.

    Getting rid of the harmful chemicals is “a multi-billion-dollar elephant in front of us,” said Corey Theriault, a technical expert focused on PFAS treatment at the engineering and consulting firm Arcadis.

    PFAS have been destroyed via incineration, but there are questions about how thoroughly burning works, and the Defense Department halted the practice of burning these chemicals last year.

    Everyone from municipal water providers to Fortune-100 companies have shown interest in the technologies, Theriault said. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is offering a contract to handle, destroy and replace fire-fighting foam that is rich in PFAS, worth some $800 million, according to the government’s solicitation document.

    PFAS became so popular in consumer goods because of the durable carbon-fluorine bond that makes up the links in “short-chain” and “long-chain” versions of the chemicals. These bonds help repel stains, water and grease, and cut off oxygen to dangerous blazes.

    But that chemical bond is also exceedingly hard to break.

    Many methods being tested right now to eliminate PFAS have often been used in other chemical cleanups. Engineers are trying to burst the molecules in modified pressure cookers; split them with UV light and energized additives; rupture the PFAS chains with electricity, or strip apart atoms with cold plasma, a charged and reactive gas.

    A set of gray pipes and a large metal water filter inside a white and blue container.
    Minnesota is testing new PFAS destruction technology to pair with these high-tech PFAS water filters. Minnesota Pollution Control Agency

    No technology is yet being deployed on a large scale, but Theriault said those furthest along in development could be ready in the next six to 18 months.

    However, none of these technologies will directly treat a contaminated water source. First, the water would have to be filtered so that the PFAS ends up in a concentrate that is more cost-effective to treat, because there are more of the chemicals in each gallon. The state of Minnesota already uses a machine that sucks PFAS out of contaminated groundwater by repeatedly stirring the groundwater into a foam, where the chemicals tend to collect.

    “The cost per volume of liquid to treat for these destructive approaches is much higher,” said Timothy Strathmann, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. He is developing a destruction method called hydrothermal alkaline treatment or HALT, that he described as “a pressure cooker on steroids.”

    The need for a concentrated chemical soup to experiment on has led at least a dozen companies to pitch their products to Minnesota, because the state is already creating it with its filtering machine, said Drew Tarara, a geologist and program manager with AECOM.

    “It does feel like everybody’s trying to get their foot in the door,” Tarara said.

    Minnesota is partnering with AECOM to investigate new PFAS technologies. The first six months of this pilot study cost $500,000, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency spokeswoman Andrea Cournoyer wrote in an email.

    Minnesota will next use the De-Fluoro system, an electrochemical approach marketed by AECOM, to try to destroy the PFAS in its foamy concentrate.

    The state faces a decades-long PFAS contamination problem in the eastern part of the Twin Cities where Maplewood-based 3M, one of the original PFAS developers and manufacturers, polluted groundwater with leaky landfills and disposal sites. Money from a lawsuit the state settled with 3M in 2018 is paying for the work being done today with AECOM.

    3M recently announced it would stop using the chemicals in its products by 2025. But the challenge of cleaning up what’s already escaped into the environment remains.

    The De-Fluoro unit is “still very much in field testing,” Tarara said. The unit will be tested at the Washington County landfill for up to six weeks, where it will process the state’s collected PFAS concentrate, but Tarara and state officials have been cautious in describing what the De-Fluoro may do. Rebecca Higgins, a senior hydrogeologist at MPCA, previously told the Star Tribune that De-Fluoro may only be able to snap long-chain PFAS into shorter segments rather than destroy them.

    State officials have said before they want to test other technologies, too. Cournoyer wrote that any additional systems would be selected in accordance with the state’s procurement rules, and officials will also be searching scientific literature for reports on other technologies.

    But the world of PFAS destruction is rife with proprietary methods and non-disclosure agreements, making it hard to assess what actually works. One notable exception is a study published in the journal Science last year, where researchers boiled the chemicals with two other compounds on low heat. But the method is still in lab testing.

    Companies like Claros Technologies, a Minnesota-based startup, are mostly mum about who exactly owns the PFAS waste they’re experimenting on, because those partners may have legal liabilities. That makes it hard to validate the company’s stated results: 99.9% to 99.99% destruction of PFAS, when treated with UV light and an additive.

    Parked on snowy ground, a blue trailer is open in the back, with two people climbing in through a yellow stepladder
    The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is testing out a new technology, inside this trailer, which could destroy harmful PFAS chemicals that have been removed from groundwater. Shari L. Gross, Star Tribune

    Those tests for Claros aren’t being verified in peer-reviewed scientific journals either, because the process is proprietary.

    John Brockgreitens, the director of research and development for Claros, said the company one day hopes to treat tens of thousands of gallons of liquid daily. But he admitted that it’s hard to answer detailed questions about the results of the company’s photochemical method.

    “We talk to teams of scientists and they ask us the same thing,” he said. “Walking that line is a challenge.”

    Theriault, who said his firm remains “agnostic” on what technologies it recommends to its clients, said Arcadis had partnered with Claros and that their method “has definitely shown its promise” to be useful in more applications than some other methods.

    “There is no one technology that’s going to crush it across the board,” Theriault said.

    But for the communities facing pollution, the technologies can’t come soon enough, because current waste handling methods aren’t containing the chemicals.

    “Any landfill will fail, it doesn’t matter how they’re built,” said Rainer Lohmann, director of the University of Rhode Island’s STEEP lab and an authority on PFAS contamination.

    Many landfills no longer accept waste that’s known to be contaminated with PFAS, sources said.

    And until a regulator like the Environmental Protection Agency sets standards for how thoroughly PFAS need to be destroyed, there’s no official benchmark for the new technologies, Lohmann said.

    “Does it destroy 95 percent? 99 percent? What do you do with the rest?” Lohmann said.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Destroying ‘forever chemicals’ is a technological race that could become a multibillion-dollar industry on Feb 11, 2023.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • How Big Tech rewrote the nation’s first cell phone repair law

    This article was copublished with The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates how powerful institutions are using technology to change our society. Sign up for its newsletters here.

    New York state took a historic step toward curbing the power of Big Tech when lawmakers passed the Digital Fair Repair Act, giving citizens the right to fix their phones, tablets, and computers. For years, advocates for the “right to repair” have pushed for such legislation in statehouses nationwide. They argue that making it easier to repair gadgets not only saves consumers money, but also reduces the environmental impact of manufacturing and electronic waste. Most of those bills have failed amid intense opposition from tech companies that want to dictate how and where their products are serviced.

    The passage of the Digital Fair Repair Act last June reportedly caught the tech industry off guard, but it had time to act before Governor Kathy Hochul would sign it into law. Corporate lobbyists went to work, pressing Albany for exemptions and changes that would water the bill down. They were largely successful: While the bill Hochul signed in late December remains a victory for the right-to-repair movement, the more corporate-friendly text gives consumers and independent repair shops less access to parts and tools than the original proposal called for. (The state Senate still has to vote to adopt the revised bill, but it’s widely expected to do so.)

    New York State Governor Kathy Hochul waves during an election night event at at the Capitale in New York City on November 8, 2022.
    Many of the changes that New York Governor Kathy Hochul made to the Digital Fair Repair Act before signing it are identical to those proposed by a tech trade association called TechNet. TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images

    The new version of the law applies only to devices built after mid-2023, so it won’t help people to fix stuff they currently own. It also exempts electronics used exclusively by businesses or the government. All those devices are likely to become electronic waste faster than they would have had Hochul, a Democrat, signed a tougher bill. And more greenhouse gases will be emitted manufacturing new devices to replace broken electronics. 

    Draft versions of the bill, letters, and email correspondences shared with Grist by the repair advocacy organization Repair.org reveal that many of the changes Hochul made to the Digital Fair Repair Act are identical to those proposed by TechNet, a trade association that includes Apple, Google, Samsung, and HP among its members. Jake Egloff, the legislative director for Democratic New York state assembly member and bill sponsor Patricia Fahy, confirmed the authenticity of the emails and bill drafts shared with Grist. 

    “We had every environmental group walking supporting this bill,”  Fahy told Grist. “What hurt this bill is Big Tech was opposed to it.”

    That New York passed any electronics right-to-repair bill is “huge,” Repair.org executive director Gay Gordon-Byrne told Grist. But “it could have been huger” if not for tech industry interference. 

    Reached for comment, the governor’s office sent Grist a copy of a statement that Hochul released when she signed the bill, outlining changes made to the text. Her staff declined to address questions about the potential negative impacts of those changes, or about the process behind them. 

    For years, consumer technology companies like Apple have effectively monopolized the repair of their devices by limiting access to parts, tools, and manuals to “authorized repair partners,” which often only perform a small number of manufacturer-sanctioned fixes. Those limited services often force consumers to choose between continuing to use a broken device or obtaining a brand-new one. The version of the Digital Fair Repair Act that passed New York’s Senate and Assembly last spring sought to level the playing field for independent shops by requiring that companies make parts, tools, and documents available to everyone on fair and reasonable terms.

    A broad coalition of manufacturers opposed the bill in the spring, and its sponsors had to make significant compromises in order to pass it. “We made a lot of changes to get it over the finish line in the first day or two of June,” Fahy said. 

    Assembly member Patricia Fahy speaks at Newlab Headquarters at Brooklyn Navy Yard.
    New York Assembly Member Patricia Fahy thought focusing on small electronics in the Digital Fair Repair Act would give consumers “the biggest bang for their buck.” Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

    Those changes included explicit exclusions for everything from home appliances to police radios to farm equipment. Fahy says she was willing to omit those devices because she thought focusing on small electronics would give consumers “the biggest bang for their buck.” Data from the repair guide site iFixit shows that eight of the top 10 devices New Yorkers attempted to repair in 2020 were small consumer electronics, with cell phones and laptops topping the list.

    The Digital Fair Repair Act passed the Assembly by a vote of 145 to 1, after clearing the Senate 59 to 4. Despite that overwhelming support, the tech industry was surprised by its passage, said Democratic state Senator Neil Breslin, who sponsored the bill. “There’s a number of people who were advocating on the parts of the [manufacturers] who really, in private chats, were not expecting it would be passed,” Breslin told Grist. 

    At that point, the bill’s opponents approached Hochul seeking concessions. In particular, state lobbying records show TechNet held frequent meetings with the governor between June and December, when she signed the bill. Lobbyists representing Apple, Google, and Microsoft also met with the governor, state records show. 

    All of these organizations have lobbied against right-to-repair bills in other states, often citing intellectual property and cybersecurity concerns. But some, most notably Microsoft, have softened their stance in recent years. Fahy said Microsoft “constantly tried to reach out” to her office to cooperate on the bill. In a letter sent to the governor in November, the company requested several edits but did not ask for a veto. (Microsoft, Google, and Apple declined to comment.)

    In letters sent to Hochul in July and August, Apple, IBM and TechNet all asked the governor to veto the bill. (IBM also declined to comment.) When a veto didn’t immediately happen, TechNet sent Hochul a trimmed-down version with edits attributed to David Edmonson, the trade organization’s vice president of state policy and government relations. Among other things, TechNet requested that the law apply only to future products sold in the state, that it exclude products sold only through business-to-business or government contracts, and that it exclude printed circuit boards on the grounds that they could be used to counterfeit devices. It also sought a stipulation allowing manufacturers to offer consumers and independent fixers assemblies, such as a battery pre-assembled with other components, if selling individual parts could create a “safety risk.” Additionally, TechNet wanted a requirement that independent repair shops provide customers with a written notice of U.S. warranty laws before conducting repairs. 

    Hochul’s office sent TechNet’s revised draft to repair advocates to get their reaction. Those advocates shared the TechNet-edited version of the bill with Fahy’s staff, which gave it to the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, the agency charged with protecting American consumers. Documents that Repair.org shared with Grist show that FTC staff were highly critical of many of the changes. The parts assembly provision, one commission staffer wrote in response to TechNet’s edits, “could be easily abused by a manufacturer” to create a two-tiered system in which individual components like batteries are available only to authorized repair partners. Another of TechNet’s proposed changes — deleting a requirement that manufacturers give owners and independent shops the ability to reset security locks in order to conduct repairs — could result in a “hollow right to repair” in which security systems thwart people from fixing their stuff, the staffer wrote.

    “These particular TechNet edits all have a common theme — ensuring that manufacturers retain control over the market for the repair of their products,” Dan Salsburg, a chief counsel for the FTC’s Office of Technology, Research and Investigation, wrote in an email to Fahy’s office.

    Despite the agency’s stern warning, all of the changes described above, and numerous other edits TechNet proposed, appeared in the bill Hochul signed — many of them verbatim. 

    The version of the Digital Fair Repair Act that passed the New York Legislature last spring defined “digital electronic equipment” broadly.
    In the proposed edits that TechNet sent to Governor Kathy Hochul’s office, the industry group proposed excluding devices sold under business-to-business or government contracts from the definition of “digital electronic equipment.” Elsewhere, TechNet asked for the law to apply only to devices manufactured or sold after the law went into effect, instead of applying to devices that consumers already owned.
    The version of the bill that Hochul signed in December adopted TechNet’s suggestions with minor rewordings.

    Chris Gilrein, TechNet’s executive director for the Northeast, told Grist in an emailed statement that the bill the Legislature passed “presented unacceptable risks to consumer data privacy and safety,” and that his organization’s recommended changes “addressed the most egregious security issues.” Manufacturers often cite cybersecurity as a reason to restrict access to repair, an argument the FTC found “scant evidence” to support in a report to Congress published in 2021.

    Gilrein disputed the notion that the final version of the bill favored the tech industry. “At its core, the law remains a state-mandated transfer of intellectual property that is unwarranted at a time when consumers have access to more repair options than ever before,” he said.

    Todd Bone, the president of XS International, a company that maintains and repairs network and data center IT equipment for corporations and the federal government, says the law offers “nothing” to his business because of the governor’s carveout for devices sold under business-to-business or government contracts.

    “It was very disheartening,” Bone told Grist, “to see the governor working with TechNet and not paying attention to the votes from the Congress and the Senate in the state of New York, [and] what the consumers of the state of New York wanted.”

    Jessa Jones, who founded iPad Rehab, an independent repair shop in Honeoye Falls, about 20 miles south of Rochester, New York, says the original bill included provisions that would have made it far easier for independent shops like hers to get the tools, parts, and know-how needed to make repairs. She pointed to changes that allow manufacturers to release repair tools that only work with spare parts they make, while at the same time controlling how those spare parts are used, both of which were requested by TechNet.

    “If you keep going down this road, allowing manufacturers to force us to use their branded parts and service, where they’re allowed to tie the function of the device to their branded parts and service, that’s not repair,” Jones said. “That’s authoritarian control.”

    Dish employee Johnson Chuong takes apart an iPhone to fix a cracked screen in San Francisco, California, in 2016.
    Last-minute changes to the Digital Fair Repair Act allow manufacturers to release repair tools that only work with spare parts they make, while at the same time controlling how those spare parts are used. Liz Hafalia/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

    After repair advocates shared TechNet’s draft with Fahy’s office, they collaborated on a counterproposal that pushed back against many of the proposed changes. The last-minute negotiations with the governor’s office were “frustrating,” Fahy said, although she still ultimately wants to see the bill become law. 

    Fahy hopes the New York Department of State will clarify aspects of the bill that got muddied by industry influence. The agency, which plays a role in consumer protection, will craft regulations dictating how the law will be implemented. Ultimately, Fahy says the bill will still help consumers save money and keep old devices out of landfills. And every little bit counts: In New York state alone, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group estimates that Americans discard roughly 23,600 cell phones per day.

    Fahy also believes the law — imperfect though it may be — will have a ripple effect beyond the state’s borders. It could give momentum to the efforts to pass similar laws in dozens of other states. Eventually, the passage of state bills could lead to a national agreement between electronics manufacturers and the independent repair community, similar to what happened in the car industry after Massachusetts passed an auto right-to-repair law in 2012.

    Other lawmakers agree that New York has provided a welcome starting point. 

    “When you’re the first state, sometimes you have to pass something very small to get across the finish line,” Washington state representative Mia Gregerson, a Democrat who is sponsoring a digital right-to-repair bill in her state’s house, told Grist. New York’s Digital Fair Repair Act, Gregerson said, “gives us something to work from.”

    “We’re going to take that now and try to do a better piece of legislation,” Gregerson said.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Big Tech rewrote the nation’s first cell phone repair law on Feb 8, 2023.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Recognising the achievements of sportswomen: Correct the Internet

    A few days ago, BroadAgenda editor Ginger Gorman spotted a stunning iInternet campaign, designed to “Correct the Internet“, allowing female elite athletes to take their rightful places in the history books.

    To quote from the campaign:

    Many of the world’s best athletes are women. And many of the world’s sporting records are held by women. But due to human bias, our search engines have learnt to prioritise sportsmen in our search results, even when the facts put sportswomen first.

    We want to change that.

    By using each search engine’s inbuilt feedback function to send feedback whenever we find something wrong, we can get the inconsistencies in our search results logged and fixed.

    Ginger had a chat with former New Zealand elite footballer, Rebecca Sowden, about the campaign.

    In a few sentences, tell us a bit about yourself and your background. 

    I’m a former New Zealand Football Fern who has spent 20 years at the intersection of sports, media and entertainment. Nearly four years ago I founded Team Heroine, a women’s sport sponsorship and marketing agency after I was watching the FIFA Women’s World Cup in France and felt that brands still weren’t unleashing the opportunity around women’s sport.

    What’s the “Correct the Internet” campaign all about? 

    It’s a social cause initiatve to tackle the gender bias that occurs on the internet against sportswomen in hopes of giving sportswomen their rightful place on the internet and ultimately increasing the visibility of women’s sport.

    How did it come about?

    A group of like-minded people came together after finding we were incurring the same problem that when we searched online for information or statistics pertaining to sports or sportswomen we were often getting served the incorrect factual information.

    So we joined forces and in true women’s sport fashion have garnered support across the board, be it from athletes like Australian swimmer, Tasmin Cook, Perth Glory footballer Tash Riby, the United Nations, Women’s Sport Australia, Women in Sport WA and more.

    Former elite footballer Rebecca Sowden wants human bias to stop stealing glory from female athletes. Picture: Supplied

    Former elite footballer Rebecca Sowden wants human bias to stop stealing glory from female athletes. Picture: Supplied

    How have human biases (AI and algorithms) learned to replicate off-line societal biases? 

    This internet is simply a reflection of our human biases and it’s simply reflecting what it thinks we want to see as we have as humans have created this problem by teaching search engines our inherent bias.

    What do you want to see done about it? 

    We’re not only hoping to raise awareness around the incurraices around sporting information and sportswomen on the  internet but actually correct the incorrect stats. We’ve identified around 30 incorrect existing statistics that people can help correct by heading to www.correcttheinternet.com and following a few simple steps to provide feedback to the search engines and help us get these corrected. Alternatively people can also submit incorrect statistics they have found and we can also add them to our list.

    What kind of response have you had – especially from female athletes of all ages? Have the tech companies responded? 

    The support globally has been phenomenal and better than we could have ever hoped which really goes to show it’s a universal problem that is resonating around the world.

    We’ve had support from athletes like US Soccer star Alex Morgan and the US Women’s National Soccer Team Players Association to leading bodies like the United Nations and media companies supporting with free ad spots. We’re confident tech companies also want to see the correct factual information around sports and sportswomen conveyed on the internet.

    What do we do if we find a mistake online? 

    Head to www.correcttheinternet.com and get in contact with us to let us know so we can add it to our on-going list which people can support.  Alternatively if you find something moving forward online you can easily submit feedback directly to that search engine by following the simple steps outlined on our website.

    Longer term, what do you hope this will achieve? What would a perfect internet look like to you, when it comes to women’s sport and representation? 

    We want people to receive the correct factual information around sport no matter who they are or where they are searching from.

    We want sportswomen to be recognised for their achievements and we want to inspire the next generation.

    Anything else you’d like to say? 

    We created this problem, but we can all fix it. Get correcting now!

     

    The post Recognising the achievements of sportswomen: Correct the Internet appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • The Role Of Technology In The Exposition Of War Crimes In Ukraine: How The Use Of Cutting-Edge Technologies And Open-Sources Investigations Can Expose Human Rights Violations

    This month marks a year of conflict in Ukraine. Since Russian Forces launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine on the 24th February 2022, the world has seen a rise in digital evidence, such as videos, drones, satellite imagery and cutting-edge tools. Whilst this evidence may prove to be extremely efficient to denounce human rights violations and war crimes, there is also a growing risk of misleading information and falsehoods about the war. Amid this stream of information, it is crucial to use a clear methodology based on credible, authentic and ethical evidence-gathering and analysis[1], and to analyse and verify each piece of potential evidence.

    Maryna Slobodyanyuk is the Head of the investigation department at Truth Hounds, an NGO founded in 2014 by Ukrainian human rights defenders willing to document war crimes when hostilities started with Russian Forces invading the Crimean Peninsula of Ukraine. Truth Hounds started conducting field missions in dangerous areas controlled by Russia, in order to uncover atrocities and violations of international humanitarian law, and to reveal the truth. With the development of new technologies in recent years, they started using open-source intelligence (OSINT) to conduct investigations. They implemented a database to register and transfer all cases of collected war crimes, with separate sections for alleged perpetrators and victims/survivors. The aim is to make each case as structured and complete as possible, and to connect different cases with similar characteristics, such as the same perpetrators, time, place, scale, and operational mode. After cross-cutting this information, it becomes possible to start identifying certain patterns related to war crimes.

    A woman walking next to a shelled building, Kharkiv, Ukraine, November 2022. This photo is copyright of the author (Lila Carrée).

     

    Truth Hounds, in cooperation with international organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, works on several investigation cases using digital technology. For instance, they are currently working on a 3D model and simulation of the destruction of the port city of Mariupol in the Donetsk Oblast region. Russian Forces started bombing Mariupol at the beginning of March 2022, as part of the Russian Eastern and Southern Ukraine strategic offensive, killing thousands of civilians by shelling residential buildings, stores, and public institutions, such as the theatre. Satellite images have shown the extent of the destruction caused by Russian bombs. Further, a model of the detonation was created to determine the model of explosive and weight of the blast, based on an analysis of aerial bombs used by Russia arsenal, and localisation of nearby Russian airfields. Experts found that the bombing was conducted by a fighters’ aircraft, a weapon extensively used in the South of Ukraine. After cross-cutting architectural plans, mathematical modelling, and satellite imagery, it was possible to reconstruct the attack, and to show that Russia intentionally targeted civilians, which would constitute a war crime under international law.

    Truth Hounds forms part of the 5am coalition, a network of human rights organisations devoted to documenting and gathering evidence of war crimes in Ukraine, through the use of new technologies. They are also submitting their findings to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which represents the first step to potentially bring a case to court. Further, Maryna has also started cooperating with local prosecutors in Ukraine, which might lead to faster and more efficient justice results compared to pursuing crimes at the international level. In 2018, a war department was created in the prosecutor’s office, with sub-departments dedicated to war crimes, investigation, and security in various regions of Ukraine, and OSINT training is now a new reality for prosecutors.

    Additionally, organisations use social media platforms such as Twitter, TikTok and Telegram to gather critical content, such as videos, photos and GPS locations. Russian soldiers and military staff tend to publish their photos and locations without realising that experts can use them to uncover key elements. Thanks to innovative apps such as SunCalc, researchers can ascertain the sun’s movement using interactive maps, sunrise and sunset times and shadow length, enabling them to track the position of Russian soldiers at a specific time and location, and to discard manipulated narratives often used by Russia. Using cross-platform searches, they can trace and follow up digital footprints of perpetrators and see if they intend to cross borders, which is incredibly useful when using universal justice mechanisms, such as international criminal tribunals and courts.

    Dalila Mujagic, legal advisor at Witness, a U.S.-based NGO, works on the intersection of technology and international criminal law. She believes visual evidence is a powerful resource to document and denounce war crimes. Indeed, it is worth recalling that back in 1945, video footage was used as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. 50 years later, a video of a mass execution of Bosnians during the Srebrenica massacre was revealed during the trial of former Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević and from 2011 in Syria, human-rights focused technology was used for the first time by individual activists. New technologies revolutionise human rights abuses investigations. Nevertheless, with the flow of photos, videos and posts coming out of Ukraine, it is difficult to recognise what is authentic and what is not.

    To address this, Dalila works with the Ukrainian Legal Advisory Group to train people on the ground to capture footage of potential crimes. Recently, the ‘5 tips for filing human rights abuses in Ukraine’[2], an infographic on what to consider before sharing on social media, was released, and downloaded more than 3000 times in just 2 weeks. Witness works with partners on the ground, to help them capture and preserve trusted and authentic video footage of human rights crimes. As Benjamin Powers, technology reporter for Grid disclosed in an interview with the author, “it is essential to have a 360-degree approach when capturing footage, with metadata and key details like shadows, landmarks, military items. Footages need to be contextualised to be useful for investigators or future legal proceedings”. Even though a single video cannot be an admissible piece of evidence, it can be a key piece of the puzzle, alongside other proofs: “We need to think of all the puzzle pieces we collect, one by one, to create the bigger picture” (Maryna Slobodyanyuk).

    These technological tools can prove to be very powerful and accurate, enabling experts to collect crucial clues, find key evidence, uncover violations of the laws of war, as well as eliminating misinformation and propaganda, as Benjamin recalls. The aim of organisations investigating human rights crimes and abuses is to collect legal evidence that can be admissible in court before they disappear from the web. As Maryna states: “I want our investigations to be strong and admissible enough to become an official prejudicial argument”. To support that goal, the University of California at Berkeley’s Human Rights Center developed a protocol for using OSINT that can be admissible in courts, and Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based investigative journalism group specialised in fact-checking and open-source intelligence, keeps compiling incidents that have resulted in potential attacks on civilians in Ukraine. Furthermore, Starling Lab, an academic research lab supported by Stanford University, uses Web3 technology[3] – the same blockchain technology that underlies cryptocurrency and Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – to document alleged war crimes through cryptography tools[4] such as encrypted and secured communication and face recognition softwares.

    Technology has drastically changed the ways of warfare, including how criminal investigations are conducted. As Benjamin affirms: “It is absolutely crucial to gather evidence, making sure it never gets lost”. This new way of collecting evidence marks a radical shift and is drastically evolving with the web native Gen Z, who use new methods to simultaneously capture, absorb and share information on human rights abuses online. This real-time speed and exposure of information exacerbates misinformation, but it also means that there are more and more eyes on the conflict, with real-time monitoring of attacks.

    Even though digital records of war crimes have been used in other conflicts, the use of open-source investigation evidence in the Ukraine war takes this to a higher scale. We are witnessing a systematic effort from various stakeholders that is new in the modern history of war. Ultimately, as Maryna affirms, “the goal is to fight against impunity, and to see that alleged criminals are sentenced and fully recognized in the face of the world, facing the consequences of their acts”. Open-source evidence is crucial in complex cases, and in the development of international law, enabling the achievement of justice. And even though international war-crimes cases are very difficult to prosecute, collecting evidence via digital tools on atrocities is also a powerful defence tool against propaganda and disinformation and creates historical testimonies. The conflict in Ukraine may be technology’s greatest legal test in future war crimes cases.

    Author: Lila Carrée.

    Editors: Hayley D’Souza and Kamil Hazbun-Muñoz

    Sources:

    Interviews

    • Interview with Maryna Slobodyanyuk in-person in Kyiv, November 2022
    • Interview with Dalila Mujagic via phone call, November 2022
    • Interview with Benjamin Powers via phone call, November 2022

    Articles

     

    [1] Murad Code: https://www.muradcode.com/

    [2] https://library.witness.org/product/5-tips-ukraine/

    [3] https://ethereum.org/en/web3/

    [4] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1135885

  • Green Left Show #32: Online privacy, digital surveillance and gambling reform

    Data privacy, digital rights, gambling reform and more on the Green Left Show with Lizzie O’Shea and Suzanne James.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • France under fire over fast-track plan for AI video surveillance at Paris Olympics

    Ministers say exceptional security needed but rights groups warn new law could extend police powers permanently

    The French government is fast-tracking special legislation for the 2024 Paris Olympics that would allow the use of video surveillance assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

    Ministers have argued that certain exceptional security measures are needed to ensure the smooth running of the events that will attract 13 million spectators, but rights groups have warned France is seeking to use the Games as a pretext to extend police surveillance powers, which could then become permanent.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Online dating safety: we need more than ID verification

    Online dating apps have become an integral part of human connection in the digital age. For many it’s a convenient way to connect, have fun and fall in love. Like traditional dating you have bad dates,  mortifying message exchanges after refreshing yourself at the local with your friends. It seems easy and a good way to find you person.

    There is a darker experience of online dating, though. Research from Australian Institute of Criminology showed three out of four participants in the study had been exposed to sexual violence, facilitated through a dating application.

    It also showcases the attitudes that are prevalent in society towards women and girls and the behaviours that are commonly experienced by them online, and the gendered impacts that has on women’s participation in the digital realm.

    In response to the rise of sexual violence, and concerns  from the eSafety commission, Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland MP set up a National Round table bringing together; government, civil society and tech to talk about the current issues in Australia and understand what solutions and opportunities for change exist in an Australian legal and cultural context.

    There will be no singular linear solution, violence against women is a wicked social policy issue and dating apps are one niche aspect makes up a broader communications eco system.

    The intersection between different communities and people’s perceptions of personal safety also needs to be taken into consideration.

    The usability of these applications can make it easier to find matches on other platforms; Tinder offers a Facebook login which can lead to your facebook profile showing up as a suggested friend option to people who you’ve matched with on Tinder (who also use facebook as a sign in option). There’s certainly a safety concern there.

    Similarly, other app engagement strategies encourage and incentivise linking to personal social media accounts, as access to that data set is incredibly valuable for further marketing purpose. For this reason we need big tech to join the discussion.

    Addressing the problem at one point won’t necessarily address the problem elsewhere, but designing a best practice national standard for dating apps hopefully will lead to transforming the overall communications safety standard.

    Last week Kat Berney did numerous media interviews last week explaining that online dating and safety was more complex that just ID verification. Picture: Supplied

    Kat Berney, Director of the National Women’s Safety Alliance, did numerous media interviews last week explaining that online dating and safety was more complex that just ID verification. Picture: Supplied

    This round table is great start in what needs to be a detailed discussion between key stake holders and most crucially understanding the breadth of user experience.

    The ways someone can use a dating app to harass or exert violence on another person is very dynamic and comprehensive, including both online and face-to-face abuse, pressure to send material, extortion, digital stalking, physical stalking, online facilitated child abuse, manipulation of users who have children to access their children.

    There are a wide net of opportunities for perpetrators, so it can look different depending on the complainant’s experience.

    Addressing dating app safety is multi-faceted, especially as it’s common for people to move off the dating app itself quickly.

    We need to explore opportunities to bridge the gap between different platforms  – for example, consider a couple moving their initial match and conversation from Tinder onto WhatsApp. How will they stay safe? It would help understand common behaviours when moving between platforms and risks that are then introduced along with potentially mapping perpetrator behaviour.

    Some “safety features” might actually have the opposite effect. For example, identity verification has the potential to inadvertently jeopardise the safety of some users with LGBTIQ+ status who are not ready to disclose.

    Identity verification also isn’t a compulsory feature of dating apps. The domestic, family and sexual violence sector is calling for mandatory ID checks, but this needs to be a collaborative piece of work examining impacts on varying communities.

    Current ID verification is voluntary and it’s been shown that some of the verification systems can be ‘’gamed’’, so perpetrators could effectively pose as someone else using a profile of photos that have otherwise been ‘verified’ as a means to disarm someone into thinking they are someone else or doxing and harassing their ex-partner by posing as them in a dating site.

    This is commonly known as catfishing, there is limited formal research into impacts on victims often due to the shame carried by the victims.

    Catfishing became vernacular in popular culture after artist Nev Schulman made a documentary detailing his experience with being catfished by a woman named Angela. It transpired the practice was  disturbingly commonplace the documentary became a show on MTV with 8 series and spinoff specifically looking at predator trolling.

    Viewers are able to write in their suspicions and get help in confronting their “catfish”. This is a double edged situation has the acceptance of this behaviour as a cultural norm in this kind of communication, meant that we have lowered our tolerance threshold towards the damaging behaviour experienced online?

    The rise of informal peer support pages in social media,  shows that people who have experienced abuse – be it unwanted sexual images, explicit conversation or harassment – are looking for an outlet to share their experiences and gain support from peers.

    Pages like Bye Felipe, Tinder translators and Beam Me up Softboi invite  followers to send in Direct Message exchanges, dating profiles highlighting unacceptable online behaviour. The submissions range from ridiculous to terrifying. All submissions are deidentified and one assumes that formal outcomes haven’t been sought.

    These peer supports need to be taken into consideration when designing policy solution. The role they play in people unpacking  negative experience and behaviours they have been exposed to.

    This is an issue we need to address from multiple angles. There have long been calls for mandatory police/criminal record checks – this has become especially pronounced in the wake of the recent murder of Danielle Finlay-Jones, whose death could have been prevented through this mechanism.

    However, we must also recognise that the vast majority of perpetrators who exist in our society are unlikely to have a criminal history. For this reason, we need to work alongside industry to develop ways to disrupt ALL abuse. Along with developing a deeper understanding of who these perpetrators are and how they are using digital tools like dating apps to advance their agenda.

    • This article was written with thanks to Leah Dwyer, Director Of Policy and Advocacy at YWCA Canberra and Hannah Robertson, PhD Candidate at the ANU 

    The post Online dating safety: we need more than ID verification appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • New FTX Filing Pulls Back the Curtain on Sam Bankman-Fried’s Massive Influence Peddling Operation

    A filing in FTX’s bankruptcy proceedings is shedding light on the true extent of the crypto-trading powerhouse’s influence peddling operation. Last week, FTX filed its creditor matrix, a document that lists former vendors and investors to the company.

    The list includes nearly a dozen public relations experts — specialists who generate positive spin in the media on behalf of clients — as well as political consultants, think tanks, and trade groups.

    Sometimes, the money went directly to political operations; Majority Forward, a dark-money group designed to elect Senate Democrats, received cash. In some cases, the hired guns, such as PR firms, were paid directly for their services. In others, the groups that received donations maintain that they are independent, but had interests aligned with FTX.

    The filing, for instance, listed a donation to the Center for a New American Security, a prominent national security-focused think tank in Washington, D.C., that has worked to shape crypto regulations.

    The filing offered a look under the hood of FTX’s intricate maze of influence. On the heels of its meteoric rise as a crypto exchange, FTX quickly began to spend extraordinary amounts of money to buy prestige and friends in high places. Now that the firm stands accused of siphoning off billions of its investors’ dollars — with its disgraced founder Sam Bankman-Fried charged with fraud in the matter — increased scrutiny is falling on powerbrokers’ dealings with FTX.

    The relationships of many of the entities listed in the bankruptcy filing and FTX were already known — the company complied with lobbying disclosures for some of its consultants — but the creditor matrix shows the crypto giant also retained several previously undisclosed professional influence peddlers.

    One seasoned political hand tied to FTX without any disclosures is former New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson. His firm, Cojo Strategies, is featured in the FTX vendor list. Another is Susan McCue, a former aide to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who has advised many Senate Democrats and played a role in the leadership of several Democratic super PACs and dark-money outfits. Her firm, Message Global, is in the filing.

    Other consulting firms with a finger on the pulse of power are sprawled through the creditor matrix, which runs over 116 pages. Another creditor, Patomak Global Partners, a firm that specializes in influencing financial regulators, is led by Paul Atkins, a former Securities and Exchange commissioner. Atkins’s company touts its roster of former government officials as providing “a telescope to anticipate trends on the horizon to help position our clients for long-term success.” (Neither Johnson, McCue, nor Patomak responded to requests for comment.)

    Think Tank Crypto Regulations

    The donation to CNAS — a powerful think tank with ties to both political parties but known for staffing national security roles in Democratic administrations — came at a time when the organization advocated for crypto regulations with a light touch.

    “To compete in the digital-economy race with China, the United States must foster a more innovative fintech environment,” CNAS fellow Yaya J. Fanusie said in testimony to the Senate Finance Committee on July 14, 2021. “If U.S. securities regulation does not evolve to account for the new technical and entrepreneurial capabilities offered by blockchain technology and broadcast data transmission, the United States could be hamstrung in a data revolution that is only just beginning.”

    CNAS also maintains a task force on crypto, on which FTX formerly served as a member. The task force corresponded with national security-focused government officials, offering policy advice that reflected the crypto industry’s contention that digital tokens on the blockchain pose a low risk for terror financing.

    A readout of a CNAS meeting with the Treasury Department’s Brian Nelson, the undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, included a summary of the discussion and noted that the official “recognized the work of many in industry to engage in constructive dialogue and support government efforts to mitigate the misuse of virtual assets for money laundering.” The use of crypto for “illicit activities remains below the scale of traditional finance,” Nelson said.

    CNAS’s task force is co-chaired by Sigal Mandelker, who used to hold Nelson’s position at the Treasury before resigning in 2019 to enter the private sector. Mandelker now serves as general partner of Ribbit Capital, an investor in FTX. Mandelker spoke at SALT’s Crypto Bahamas conference last summer. The invite-only conference for “leading players in the crypto and traditional finance industry” also featured talks from Bankman-Fried, former President Bill Clinton, and ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

    Mandelker’s talk at Crypto Bahamas was on maintaining permissive crypto regulations.

    “The instinct of government is often to focus on risk and not to put as much emphasis on opportunity,” she said. The true risk regulators should be wary of, Mandelker continued, was “shutting down [crypto] innovation.” (Mandelker did not respond to a request for comment.)

    “CNAS received a $25,000 donation from FTX in 2022 in general support of CNAS’s independent research on national security,” Shai Korman, CNAS’s director of communications, told The Intercept. “FTX was also a member of the Task Force on Fintech, Crypto, and National Security. FTX is no longer a member of the task force, and CNAS has returned the donation in full.”

    PR, Law Firms, and Video Games

    FTX once enjoyed a near-mythical status in the media, with splashy cover stories and gushing news articles lauding the crypto powerhouse and Bankman-Fried, its youthful leader. Such coverage rarely emerges organically, and FTX hired an army of public relations firms to burnish its image.

    Among them was M Group, a New York-based public relations powerhouse known for its Rolodex of elite journalists. Others under the employ of FTX included TSD Communications and Full Court Press Communications.

    The creditor list includes Rational 360, a public relations firm led in part by former White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart. Emails obtained by Matt Stoller, the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, show that Rational 360 pressured activists and political influencers to speak out in favor of a bill that would move crypto regulatory authority to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. While the Securities and Exchange Commission handles many enforcement actions against crypto firms, the CFTC is seen as more friendly to crypto interests and has fewer disclosure requirements.

    Powerhouse law firms also feature heavily in the most recent bankruptcy disclosure. One firm listed is Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, which represented Russia in a $3 billion bond dispute against Ukraine before it shuttered its Moscow office last year. Buckley LLP, another large law firm based in Washington that appeared on the FTX creditor list, announced earlier this month that it would merge with the San Francisco-based Orrick to create a combined firm with a total of nearly $1.5 billion focused on “forward-looking regulatory and enforcement advice” in the fields of finance and tech.

    Among FTX’s listed creditors were a handful of nations — though the contours of the financial relationships remain unknown. Nevertheless, the list of countries reads like a who’s who of nations with lax financial regulations: The British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Isle of Man, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates, Seychelles, and Switzerland all appear in the filing.

    In addition to national banks and powerful firms in the corporate PR world, the creditor matrix also details luxury restaurants like Carbone in Miami and the luxury Margaritaville resort in Nassau.

    The North America League of Legends Championship Series, a property of a premier video game event franchise, is also listed in the creditor matrix. Bankman-Fried, notorious for playing the video game “League of Legends” during pitch meetings with investors, arranged a $96 million sponsorship deal with Riot Games. In December, as the extent of FTX’s deception unfolded, Riot announced it would attempt to cut ties with Bankman-Fried.

    The entertainment relationships provided, in some cases, an additional channel for political access. The creditor list includes the talent agency WME, with a memo mentioning actor Larry David, a celebrity endorser of FTX who appeared in a now-infamous Super Bowl commercial promoting the crypto exchange.

    WME itself is owned by Endeavor, an investor in FTX that owns 38,000 shares of the company. Endeavor is also run by Ari Emanuel, the brother of Rahm Emanuel, President Joe Biden’s ambassador to Japan.

    Editor’s Note: In September 2022, The Intercept received $500,000 from Sam Bankman-Fried’s foundation, Building a Stronger Future, as part of a $4 million grant to fund our pandemic prevention and biosafety coverage. That grant has been suspended. In keeping with our general practice, The Intercept disclosed the funding in subsequent reporting on Bankman-Fried’s political activities.

    The post New FTX Filing Pulls Back the Curtain on Sam Bankman-Fried’s Massive Influence Peddling Operation appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Apple Brings Mainland Chinese Web Censorship to Hong Kong

    When Safari users in Hong Kong recently tried to load the popular code-sharing website GitLab, they received a strange warning instead: Apple’s browser was blocking the site for their own safety. The access was temporarily cut off thanks to Apple’s use of a Chinese corporate website blacklist, which resulted in the innocuous site being flagged as a purveyor of misinformation. Neither Tencent, the massive Chinese firm behind the web filter, nor Apple will say how or why the site was censored.

    The outage was publicized just ahead of the new year. On December 30, 2022, Hong Kong-based software engineer and former Apple employee Chu Ka-cheong tweeted that his web browser had blocked access to GitLab, a popular repository for open-source code. Safari’s “safe browsing” feature greeted him with a full-page “deceptive website warning,” advising that because GitLab contained dangerous “unverified information,” it was inaccessible. Access to GitLab was restored several days later, after the situation was brought to the company’s attention.

    The warning screen itself came courtesy of Tencent, the mammoth Chinese internet conglomerate behind WeChat and League of Legends. The company operates the safe browsing filter for Safari users in China on Apple’s behalf — and now, as the Chinese government increasingly asserts control of the territory, in Hong Kong as well.

    Apple spokesperson Nadine Haija would not answer questions about the GitLab incident, suggesting they be directed at Tencent, which also declined to offer responses.

    The episode raises thorny questions about privatized censorship done in the name of “safety” — questions that neither company seems interested in answering: How does Tencent decide what’s blocked? Does Apple have any role? Does Apple condone Tencent’s blacklist practices?

    “They should be responsible to their customers in Hong Kong and need to describe how they will respond to demands from the Chinese authorities to limit access to information,” wrote Charlie Smith, the pseudonymous founder of GreatFire, a Chinese web censorship advocacy and watchdog group. “Presumably people purchase Apple devices because they believe the company when they say that ‘privacy is a fundamental human right’. What they fail to add is *except if you are Chinese.”

    Ka-cheong tweeted that other Hong Kong residents had reported GitLab similarly blocked on their devices thanks to Tencent. “We will look into it,” Apple engineer Maciej Stachowiak tweeted in response. “Thanks for the heads-up.” But Ka-cheong, who also serves as vice president of Internet Society Hong Kong Chapter, an online rights group, said he received no further information from Apple.

    “Presumably people purchase Apple devices because they believe the company when they say that ‘privacy is a fundamental human right’. What they fail to add is *except if you are Chinese.”

    The block came as a particular surprise to Ka-cheong and other Hong Kong residents because Apple originally said the Tencent blocklist would be used only for Safari users inside mainland China. According to a review of the Internet Archive, however, sometime after November 24, 2022, Apple quietly edited its Safari privacy policy to note that the Tencent blacklist would be used for devices in Hong Kong as well. (Haija, the Apple spokesperson, did not respond when asked when or why Apple expanded the use of Tencent’s filter to Hong Kong.)

    Though mainland China has heavily censored internet access for decades, Hong Kong typically enjoyed unfettered access to the web, a freedom only recently threatened by the passage of a sweeping, repressive national security law in 2020.

    Silently expanding the scope of the Tencent list not only allows Apple to remain in the good graces of China — whose industrial capacity remains existentially vital to the California-based company — but also provides plausible deniability about how or why such site blocks happen.

    “While unfortunately many tech companies proactively apply political and religious censorship to their mainland Chinese users, Apple may be unique among North American tech companies in proactively applying such speech restrictions to users in Hong Kong,” said Jeffrey Knockel, a researcher with Citizen Lab, a digital security watchdog group at the University of Toronto.

    Knockel pointed out that while a company like Tencent should expected to comply with Chinese law as a matter of course, Apple has gone out of its way to do so.

    “The aspect which we should be surprised by and concerned about is Apple’s decision to work with Tencent in the first place to filter URLs for Apple’s Hong Kong users,” he said, “when other North American tech companies have resisted Hong Kong’s demands to subject Hong Kong users to China-based filtering.”

    The block on GitLab would not be the first time Tencent deemed a foreign website “dangerous” for apparently ideological reasons. In 2020, attempts to visit the official website of Notepad++, a text editor app whose French developer had previously issued a statement of solidarity with Hong Kong dissidents, were blocked for users of Tencent web browsers, again citing safety.

    The GitLab block also wouldn’t be the first time Apple, which purports to hold deep commitments to human rights, has bent the company’s products to align with Chinese national pressure. In 2019, Apple was caught delisting an app Hong Kong political dissidents were using to organize; in November, users noticed the company had pushed a software update to Chinese iPhone users that significantly weakened the AirDrop feature, which protesters throughout the country had been using to spread messages on the ground.

    “All companies have a responsibility to respect human rights, including freedom of expression, no matter where in the world they operate,” Michael Kleinman, head of Amnesty International’s Silicon Valley Initiative, wrote to The Intercept. “Any steps by Apple to limit freedom of expression for internet users in Hong Kong would contravene Apple’s responsibility to respect human rights under the UN Guiding Principles.”

    In 2019, Apple publicly acknowledged that it had begun using a “safe browsing” database maintained by Tencent to filter the web activity of its users in China, instead of an equivalent list operated by Google. Safe browsing filters ostensibly protect users from malicious pages containing malware or spear-phishing attacks by checking the website they’re trying to load against a master list of blacklisted domains.

    In order to make such a list work, however, at least some personal information needs to be transmitted to the company operating the filter, be it Google or Tencent. When news of Apple’s use of the Tencent safe browsing list first broke, Matthew Green, a professor of cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, described it as “another example of Apple making significant modifications to its privacy infrastructure, largely without publicity or announcement.”

    “I suppose the nature of having a ‘misinformation’ category is that China is going to have its own views on what that means.”

    While important questions remain about exactly what information from Safari users in Hong Kong and China is ultimately transmitted to Tencent and beyond, the GitLab incident shows another troubling aspect of safe browsing: It gives a single company the ability to unilaterally censor the web under the aegis of public safety.

    “Our concern was that outsourcing this stuff to Chinese firms seemed problematic for Apple,” Green explained in an interview with The Intercept, “and I suppose the nature of having a ‘misinformation’ category is that China is going to have its own views on what that means.”

    Indeed, it’s impossible to know in what sense GitLab could have possibly been considered a source of dangerous “unverified information.” The site is essentially an empty vessel where software developers, including corporate clients like T-Mobile and Goldman Sachs, can safely store and edit code. The Chinese government has recently cracked down on some open-source code sites similar to GitLab, where engineers from around the world are able to freely interact, collaborate, and share information. (GitLab did not respond to a request for comment.)

    Notably, the censorship-evasion and anonymity web browser Tor has turned to GitLab to catalog instances of Chinese state internet censorship, though there’s no indication it was this activity that led to GitLab’s addition to the Tencent list.

    While Tencent provides some public explanation of its criteria for blocking a website, its decision-making process is completely opaque, and the published censorship standards are extremely vague, including offenses like “endangering national security” and “undermining national unity.”

    Tencent has long been scrutinized for its ties to the Chinese government, which frequently leverages state power to more closely influence or outright control nominally private firms.

    Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that the Chinese government was acquiring so-called golden shares of Tencent, a privileged form of equity that’s become “a common tool used by the state to exert influence over private news and content companies.” A 2021 New York Times report on Tencent noted the company’s eagerness to cooperate with Chinese government mandates, quoting the company’s president during an earnings call that year: “Now I think it’s important for us to understand even more about what the government is concerned about, what the society is concerned about, and be even more compliant.”

    While Tencent’s compliance with the Chinese national security agenda ought not to come as a surprise, Knockel of Citizen Lab says Apple’s should.

    “Ultimately I don’t think it really matters exactly how GitLab came to be blocked by Tencent’s Safe Browsing,” he said. “Tencent’s blocking of GitLab for Safari users underscores that Apple’s subjection of Hong Kong users to screening via a China-based company is problematic not only in principle but also in practice.”

    The post Apple Brings Mainland Chinese Web Censorship to Hong Kong appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Maybe Those Luddites Had a Point



    Twenty-three minutes. That’s how long it takes for your brain to refocus after shifting from one task to the next. Check your email, glance at a text, and you’ll pay for what’s called a “switch cost effect.”

    “We’ve fallen for a mass delusion that our brains can multitask. They can’t,” author Johann Hari found out in researching his latest book. We’re paying a price for our stolen ability to focus and maybe that’s one of the reasons we’re falling for autocrats and punting on solving the world’s grievous problems.

    Hari’s book “Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again” raises all sorts of good questions like this. The book is just out in paperback. Talk about technology, though, and inevitably some smart Alec will bring up the Luddites. “You don’t want to stand against progress,” that person will say. “You don’t want to be a Luddite.”

    The Luddites … didn’t start by breaking machines. They started by making demands of the factory owners to phase in the technology slowly.

    Can we spare a few minutes to focus on Luddites? Read people’s historian Peter Linebaugh, or Jacobin writer, Peter Frase; check out a Smithsonian Magazine’s feature by Clive Thompson—and you’ll find that Luddites weren’t backward-thinking thugs, but rather, skilled craftspeople whose lives were about to be wrecked.

    Textile cutters, spinners and weavers—before factories came along, those British textile workers enjoyed a pretty good life. Working from home, they had a certain amount of autonomy over their lives. The price for their products was set and published. They could work as much or as little as they liked. Come the early 1800s—war and recession—and machines and factories threatened all of that. The Luddites—a made-up name—didn’t start by breaking machines. They started by making demands of the factory owners to phase in the technology slowly. Some proposed a tax on textiles to fund worker pensions. They called for government regulation. Relief from the harms and a fair share of the profits from progress. It was only when they were denied all of that that they started breaking stuff up.

    Today, big U.S. social media companies are facing lawsuits. On January 6th, Seattle Public Schools sued TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube for their negative impact on students’ mental and emotional health. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments next month over the protections the tech industry enjoys under the law when their algorithms intentionally push potentially harmful content for profit.

    What would breaking the machines look like in our time? I don’t know. But if Hari’s right, it’s not just the quality of our lives that’s in danger. It’s the state of our minds that’s at stake.

    You can hear my full uncut conversation with Johann Hari about Noam Chomsky, the subject of his next book—a man with no problem with focus it seems—through a subscription to our free podcast, and watch my scary conversation with Hari at lauraflanders.org.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Elon Musk Caves to Pressure From India to Remove BBC Doc Critical of Modi

    Twitter and YouTube censored a report critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in coordination with the government of India. Officials called for the Big Tech companies to take action against a BBC documentary exploring Modi’s role in a genocidal 2002 massacre in the Indian state of Gujarat, which the officials deemed a “propaganda piece.”

    In a series of posts, Kanchan Gupta, senior adviser at the Indian government’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, denounced the BBC documentary as “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage.” He said that both Twitter and YouTube had been ordered block links to the film, before adding that the platforms “have complied with the directions.” Gupta’s statements coincided with posts from Twitter users in India who claimed to have shared links to the documentary but whose posts were later removed and replaced with a legal notice.

    “The government has sent hundreds of requests to different social media platforms, especially YouTube and Twitter, to take down the posts that share snippets or links to the documentary,” Indian journalist Raqib Hameed Naik told The Intercept. “And shamefully, the companies are complying with their demands and have taken down numerous videos and posts.”

    “The government has sent hundreds of requests to different social media platforms, especially YouTube and Twitter, to take down the posts that share snippets or links to the documentary.”

    This act of censorship — wiping away allegations of crimes against humanity committed by a foreign leader — sets a worrying tone for Twitter, especially in light of its new management.

    Elon Musk’s self-identification as a “free-speech absolutist” has been a primary talking point for the billionaire as he has sought to explain why he took ownership of the platform last year. Much of his criticism of Twitter revolved around its decision to censor reporting around Hunter Biden, the son of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.

    While Musk has been glad to stand up to suppression of speech against conservatives in the United States — something that he has described as nothing less than “a battle for the future of civilization” — he appears to be failing at the far graver challenge of standing up to the authoritarian demands of foreign governments. (Twitter’s communications effort is now helmed by Musk, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

    Pushing back against censorship of the BBC documentary, members of Parliament from the opposition All India Trinamool Congress party Mahua Moitra and Derek O’Brien defiantly posted links to it online.

    “Sorry, Haven’t been elected to represent world’s largest democracy to accept censorship,” Moitra posted. “Here’s the link. Watch it while you can.” Moitra’s post is still up, but the link to the documentary no longer works. Moitra had posted a link to the Internet Archive, presumably hoping to get around the block of the BBC, but the Internet Archive subsequently took the link down. She has since posted the audio version on Telegram.

    O’Brien’s post was itself taken down.


    Twitter even blocked Indian audiences from seeing two posts by actor John Cusack linking to the documentary. (They remain visible to American audiences.) Cusack said he “pushed out the links and got immediate blowback.” He told The Intercept, “I received two notices that I’m banned in India.” The actor wrote a book, “Things That Can and Cannot Be Said,” with celebrated Indian scholar Arundhati Roy, a fierce critic of the Modi government.

    The Gujarat riots, as the violence is sometimes known, occurred in 2002, when Modi was the chief minister of the state. A group of militants aligned with the Hindu nationalist movement, which encompasses Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, launched a violent campaign against local Muslims. Modi, who has been accused of personally encouraging the violence, reportedly told police forces to stand down in the face of the ongoing violence, which killed about 1,000 people.

    “The documentary has unnerved Mr. Modi as he continues to evade accountability for his complicity in the violence,” Naik, the journalist, said. “He sees the documentary as a threat to his image internationally and has launched an unprecedented crackdown in India.”

    Modi’s government in India regularly applied pressure to Twitter in an attempt to bend the social media platform to its will. At one point, the government threatened to arrest Twitter staff in the country over their refusal to ban accounts run by critics.

    When Musk took over, Twitter had just a 20 percent compliance rate when it came to Indian government takedown requests. When the billionaire took the company private, some 90 percent of Twitter India’s 200 staffers were laid off. Now, the Indian government’s pressure on Twitter appears to be gaining traction.

    A key difference may be Musk’s other business entanglements. Musk himself has his own business interests in India, where Tesla has been lobbying, so far without luck, to win tax breaks to enter the Indian market.

    Whatever the reason for the apparent change, Twitter’s moves at the behest of Modi’s government bode ill for Musk’s claims to be running the company with an aim of protecting free speech. While Musk has felt fine wading into U.S. culture wars on behalf of conservatives, he has been far more reticent to take a stand about the far direr threats to free speech from autocratic governments.

    One of the initial strengths of Twitter, and social media broadly, was the threat it posed to autocratic governments, as witnessed by its use during the 2009 protests in Iran and later the Arab Spring. Dictators across the region railed at the company for allowing what they considered to be forbidden speech.

    Musk, however, has said he defers to local laws on speech issues. “Like I said, my preference is to hew close to the laws of countries in which Twitter operates,” Musk tweeted last year. “If the citizens want something banned, then pass a law to do so, otherwise it should be allowed.”

    Google, which owns YouTube, has also come under intense pressure from the Indian government. The company’s public transparency reports show the Indian government has been a prodigious source of content takedowns, sending over 15,000 censorship demands since 2011, compared to under 5,000 from Germany and nearly 11,000 from the U.S. in the same time frame.

    These reports show a varying level of compliance on Google’s part: Between January and June 2022, Google censored nearly 9 percent of items submitted by the Indian government but almost 44 percent during that span in 2020. YouTube did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Akshay Marathe, a former spokesperson for the opposition party in control of the Delhi and Punjab government, told The Intercept that the social media takedown requests were part of a broader program of suppression. Modi “quite brazenly used India’s law enforcement apparatus to jail political opponents, journalists, and activists on a regular basis,” Marathe said. “His directive to Twitter to take down all links of the documentary (and Twitter’s shocking compliance after Elon’s commitment to free speech) also follows on the heels of the Modi government’s announcement that it will soon implement a regulatory regime in which it will have the right to determine what is fake news and order Big Tech platforms to delete the content.”

    The post Elon Musk Caves to Pressure From India to Remove BBC Doc Critical of Modi appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Johann Hari: Get Your Mind Back / Save Democracy?

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    Are we too distracted to think? The answer is worse than you’d expect. In his latest book, New York Times bestselling author …

    The post Johann Hari: Get Your Mind Back / Save Democracy? appeared first on The Laura Flanders Show.

    This post was originally published on The Laura Flanders Show.

  • COP15: Biodiversity loss, the sixth great extinction and the need for action

    Susan Price interviews Canadian ecosocialist Marc Bonhomme about the 2022 United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15), which took place in Montreal from December 7‒19.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.