TECHLASH 2

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Albania announced a one-year ban on TikTok, the popular short video app, following the killing of a teenager that raised fears over the influence of social media on children...





A14-year-old schoolboy was stabbed to death in November by a fellow pupil. Local media had reported that the incident followed arguments between the two boys on social media. Videos had also emerged on TikTok of minors supporting the killing.

The ban, part of a broader plan to make schools safer, will come into effect early next year, Prime Minister Edi Rama said after meeting with parents' groups and teachers from across the country.

"For one year, we'll be completely shutting it down for everyone. There will be no TikTok in Albania", Rama said.

Several European countries including France, Germany and Belgium have enforced restrictions on social media use for children. 

In one of the world's toughest regulations targeting Big Tech, Australia approved in November a complete social media ban for children under 16.

Rama has blamed social media, and TikTok in particular, for fuelling violence among youth in and outside school. 

Albania bans TikTok for a year after killing of teenager

Reuters







Social media users in Vietnam, on platforms including Facebook and TikTok, will need to verify their identities as part of strict new internet regulations that critics say further undermine freedom of expression in the communist country.

The law, which comes into force on Christmas Day, will compel tech companies operating in Vietnam to store user data, provide it to authorities on request, and remove content the government regards as “illegal” within 24 hours.

"Decree 147", as it is known, builds on a 2018 cybersecurity law that was sharply criticised by the US, EU and internet freedom advocates who said it mimics China’s repressive internet censorship.





In October, blogger Duong Van Thai – who had almost 120,000 followers on YouTube, where he regularly recorded livestreams critical of the government – was jailed for 12 years on charges of publishing anti-state information.

Months earlier, leading independent journalist Huy Duc, the author of one of the most popular blogs in Vietnam – which took aim at the government on issues including media control and corruption – was arrested.

His posts “violated interests of the state”, authorities said.

Ho Chi Minh City-based blogger and rights activist Nguyen Hoang Vi warned that the new decree “may encourage self-censorship, where people avoid expressing dissenting views to protect their safety – ultimately harming the overall development of democratic values” in the country.

Le Quang Tu Do, of the ministry of information and communications (MIC), told state media that decree 147 would “regulate behaviour in order to maintain social order, national security, and national sovereignty in cyberspace”.

Aside from the ramifications for social media companies, the new laws also include curbs on gaming for under-18s, designed to prevent addiction.

Just over half of Vietnam’s 100 million population regularly plays such games, says data research firm Newzoo.

A large proportion of the population is also on social media, with the MIC estimating the country has about 65 million Facebook users, 60 million on YouTube and 20 million on TikTok.

Critics decry Vietnam’s ‘draconian’ new internet law


Agence France-Presse




The UN General Assembly has adopted the United Nations Convention Against Cybercrime after five years of wrangling between various stakeholders. 

The UN bureaucracy is pleased with the development, hailing the convention as a “landmark” and “historic” global treaty that will improve cross-border cooperation against cybercrime and digital threats.

Critics have been saying that speech and human rights might fall victim to the treaty since various UN members treat human rights and privacy in vastly different ways – while the treaty now in a way “standardizes” law enforcement agencies’ investigative powers across borders.

Considerable emphasis has been put by some on how “authoritarian” countries might abuse this new tool meant to tackle online crime.

Since the UN General Assembly adopted the resolution without a vote – after the text was previously agreed on by negotiators – it is not immediately clear how many countries might sign it next year, and ratify what would then become a legally binding document.

In the meanwhile, a spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres referred to the treaty as “a demonstration of multilateralism”.

UN representatives speak about “an unprecedented platform for cooperation” that will allow agencies to exchange evidence, create a safe cyberspace, and protect victims of crimes such as child sexual abuse, scams and money laundering.

They claim all this will be achieved “while safeguarding human rights online.”



An amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, could be used to force U.S. citizens to work with the National Security Agency, the hub of American cyberspying. 

Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner, pushed Congress to pass the legislation.

Sen. Ron Wyden, a longtime surveillance critic, said he warned the tool was ripe for abuse when the Biden administration pressured Congress into approving it in April.

“These powers would inevitably be misused”, Wyden told The Intercept. 

For more than a decade, surveillance boosters have tangled with critics in Congress over NSA powers. The latest battleground arrived this spring as Congress debated its reauthorization of FISA, the law that regulates most U.S. spying directed abroad.

Under FISA, the NSA can force electronic communication service providers such as Google and Verizon to help it spy on foreigners. 

The government could force commercial landlords, for instance, to help it scoop up the communications of journalists, nonprofit groups, political campaigns, and lawyers, according to the Center for Democracy and Technology. 

The overall bill was “indispensable” to protecting the American people from terrorism, cyberattacks, and foreign enemies, Attorney General Merrick Garland told Congress in April. The House amendment, he added, was merely “technical”.





The European Parliament has taken another step in its ongoing efforts to control the flow of information online, approving the creation of a new committee tasked with combating what it describes as foreign interference and disinformation.

The "European Democracy Shield" is framed as a safeguard for democratic processes, but raises significant concerns about censorship and overreach. 

The committee’s mandate extends to scrutinizing online platforms, AI-generated content, and so-called “hybrid” threats — broad categories that could potentially encompass legitimate political speech or alternative narratives.

European Parliament Approves “European Democracy Shield” Committee to Tackle Online “Disinformation”


Dan Frieth Reclaim The Net




Il Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali (GPDB), noto anche come Garante della Privacy, ha inflitto una sanzione di 15 milioni di euro a OpenAI, la società che gestisce il chatbot di intelligenza artificiale generativa ChatGPT. 

La decisione arriva al termine di un’istruttoria avviata nel marzo 2023 e in seguito al parere dell’European Data Protection Board (EDPD) - Comitato Europeo per la Protezione dei Dati - che ha delineato un approccio comune alle questioni relative al trattamento dei dati personali nell’ambito dell’Intelligenza Artificiale (IA).

Il Garante ha accertato diverse violazioni da parte di OpenAI, tra cui l'utilizzo illecito dei dati personali degli utenti e l'assenza di meccanismi di verifica dell’età.

Il Garante ha imposto a OpenAI, avvalendosi per la prima volta dei nuovi poteri previsti dall’articolo 166 comma 7 del "Codice Privacy", di realizzare una campagna di comunicazione istituzionale di sei mesi su radio, televisione, giornali e internet.

La campagna, i cui contenuti dovranno essere concordati con l’Autorità, avrà l’obiettivo di informare il pubblico, spiegare i diritti degli interessati, sensibilizzare gli utenti e non utenti di ChatGPT su come opporsi all’utilizzo dei propri dati personali per l’addestramento dell’IA, ai sensi del General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), il Regolamento Generale sulla Protezione dei Dati (RGPD), regolamento UE n. 2016/679 in materia di trattamento dei dati personali e di privacy adottato il 27 aprile 2016.

Il provvedimento rappresenta un importante precedente in materia di protezione dei dati personali nell’ambito dell’Intelligenza Artificiale Generativa (Artificial Generative Intelligence, AGI).

OpenAI ha dichiarato: “La decisione del Garante non è proporzionata e presenteremo ricorso". 





AI is all about data. Reams and reams of data are needed to train algorithms to do what we want, and what goes into the AI models determines what comes out. 

But here’s the problem: AI developers and researchers don’t really know much about the sources of the data they are using. 

The Data Provenance Initiative, a group of over 50 researchers from both academia and industry, audited nearly 4,000 public data sets spanning over 600 languages, 67 countries, and three decades. The data came from 800 unique sources and nearly 700 organizations. 

Their findings, shared exclusively with MIT Technology Review, show a worrying trend: AI's data practices risk concentrating power overwhelmingly in the hands of a few dominant technology companies. 

Transformers, the architecture underpinning language models, were invented in 2017, and the AI sector started seeing performance get better the bigger the models and data sets were. Today, most AI data sets are built by indiscriminately hoovering material from the internet. 

The past few years have also seen the rise of multimodal generative AI models, which can generate videos and images. Like large language models, they need as much data as possible, and the best source for that has become YouTube. 

This could be a boon for Alphabet, Google’s parent company, which owns YouTube. “It gives a huge concentration of power over a lot of the most important data on the web to one company”, says Shayne Longpre, a researcher at MIT who is part of the project.  

"Because Google is also developing its own AI models, its massive advantage also raises questions about how the company will make this data available for competitors", says Sarah Myers West, the co–executive director at the AI Now Institute, “that’s reshaping the infrastructures of our world in ways that reflect the interests of those big corporations”.

“This is a new wave of asymmetric access that we haven’t seen to this extent on the open web”, Longpre says.

This is where the data to build AI comes from


Melissa Heikkilä Stephanie Arnett MIT Technology Review




"In this America, the three wealthiest men (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg) own more wealth than the bottom half of our society—over 165 million people. And their wealth is skyrocketing".

Senator Bernie Sanders has a message for Fox News readers: The United States is increasingly a country of have and have nots, and it will "move rapidly down the path of oligarchy and the rule of the super-rich" unless the people and political leaders fight for a government and economy that works for everyone.

The Vermont Independent who caucuses with Democrats framed the two Americas as "the people vs. the billionaires" in an op-ed published by Fox News.

Sanders' piece denounce the political spending by economic elites more generally unleashed by the "disastrous" Supreme Court ruling.

"That is not democracy. That is not one person, one vote", he wrote.

"Never before in American history have so few media conglomerates, all owned by the billionaire class, had so much influence over the public.

A handful of giant corporations control what is produced and how much we, as consumers, pay for their products".

Bernie Sanders Calls Out US Oligarchy in Fox News Op-Ed

Eloise Goldsmith Common Dreams




“I am the first-ever AI boxing judge”, the humanoid figure announces in the 38-second clip, “and I am here to bring fairness to the ring”.

Boxing fights are usually scored by three judges, who use the 10-point system each round to choose a winner in case there is no knockout. 

The AI judge, powered by The Ring, the well-known boxing magazine, analyzing every round, every move, and every decisive moment during the fight, will try to track landed punches, effective aggression and defense, collecting real-time metrics to calculate a score and decide who has won.

In the past, human judges have been accused of not scoring correctly, being biased, or more seriously, corrupt. It is unclear what the long-term impact of the experiment will be, but other sports including football and cricket use similar technologies to support referees and umpires to make accurate decisions more quickly, which have led to fairer results.

World’s first artificial-intelligence boxing judge unveiled for Fury-Usyk fight

ARAB NEWS




An artist known as Botto, which exhibited at Sotheby's in New York this October, has made more than $4 million from sales of its work. 

Botto needs only GPUs to get creative juices flowing.

Botto is a decentralized semi-autonomous artistic agent created in 2021 by the German artist Mario Klingemann; Simon Hudson, a media entrepreneur; and Ziv Epstein, a computer scientist and designer.

Botto contains an AI image generator similar to Dall-E or Midjourney but its output is also shaped by a “taste model” that selects the most pleasing images generated by a prompt.  Botto is also governed by a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, meaning enthusiasts can buy $Botto cryptocurrency and influence how the system is managed and developed.

Klingemann and Hudson say those who control Botto through the associated DAO have chosen to add a modified version of Mistral’s biggest open source large language model and a knowledge base that allows it to converse about its artwork, and which will be further fine tuned through interactions with the Botto community. 

“Through this interaction and through various channels of input, its knowledge will grow and it will develop a personality and interests”, Klingemann suggests.

Botto still poses some ethical conundrums. Generating high-priced images using a model trained on public work, can be seen as outright plagiarism. 

“Image models and LLMs are the new search engines”, he says. 

Botto, the Millionaire AI Artist, Is Getting a Personality


Will Knight Wired





Michigan’s licensed dispensaries are selling more cannabis flower than ever.

The Wolverine State’s retailers sold 103,129 pounds of adult-use cannabis flower in November, breaking a monthly record of 100,894 pounds from August, according to the Michigan Cannabis Regulatory Agency (CRA). 

However, August still holds Michigan’s monthly record for $295.4 million in dispensary sales—compared to $276.4 million in November sales—because prices for cannabis products continue to fall. The average price for 1 ounce of cannabis flower fell from $80.14 in August to an all-time low of $71.80 in November, according to the CRA.

Although neighboring Ohio launched adult-use sales in August, the Buckeye State’s average cost of roughly $210 per ounce for cannabis flower remains roughly triple that of Michigan’s, according to the Ohio Division of Cannabis Control. 

With November in the books, Michigan’s dispensaries have now sold more than $3 billion in adult-use cannabis for the year with December numbers still to be configured—an annual record in the five-year history of the program.

Michigan recorded $2.98 billion in adult-use sales in 2023, with $80 million in medical sales pushing the overall total to $3.06 billion, according to the CRA.

Since adult-use sales launched in December 2019, Michigan’s dispensaries have reported $9.85 billion in cumulative adult-use transactions and $1.33 billion in medical cannabis transactions for a combined total of nearly $11.2 billion in sales—representing the nation’s second-largest market after California.

Michigan remains on pace to eclipse $3.3 billion in cannabis sales in 2024, while California—having four times the population—is on pace to record just shy of $4.7 billion in sales. 


Michigan Dispensaries Break $3 Billion Annual Sales Record, 103K Pounds Monthly Flower Record


Tony Lange Cannabis Business Times




In 2016, scientists became aware of a die-off of common murres, seabirds resembling flying penguins, that were found washed ashore from Alaska to California. A 2020 study estimated, based on an extrapolation from carcasses found on beaches, that roughly 4 million murres may have died, calling it “unprecedented and astonishing”, even “biblical”.

The research estimates that 4 million common murres (Uria aalge) died from 2014 to 2016 during the height of a marine heat wave nicknamed “the blob” in the north Pacific Ocean. This makes it the largest mortality event not just among birds but of any non-fish vertebrate in the modern era, the researchers say.

“I think what really punched us in the gut was having a really abundant, widespread top predator in the marine ecosystem that, over a really short period of about a year, lost half of its population,” , told Mongabay.

To determine the scale of the loss, study lead author Heather Renner, a supervisory wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and co-authors compared the common murre populations at 13 breeding colonies in Alaska for seven years before and after the heat wave. 

During the heat wave between 2014 and 2016, there was a dramatic population drop-off of 52% to 78% at the 13 colonies, and no recovery thereafter.

The researchers, echoing the conclusion of the 2020 paper, write that the die-off was most likely from starvation due to reduced access to forage fish. Murre typically eat half their weight in food daily, or about 60 to 120 forage fish. The heat wave also affected predatory fish like Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus) and humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae).

The authors write that their study “is the first to show that climate impacts can be swift (1 year) and intense (eliminating half of the population)”.

Tim Birkhead, a murre expert and professor emeritus at the University of Sheffield, U.K., not involved with the research, noted the study showed that “the marine heatwave has had far reaching, long-lasting effects”, the latest “tragic” news for seabirds, which have been in substantial decline around the world in recent decades.

“The blob” that hit areas like the Gulf of Alaska in the Pacific Ocean in the mid-2010s has been linked to climate change, and more marine heat waves are expected.

“Common murre populations in the Gulf of Alaska and East Bering Sea will likely fail to recover to pre-heatwave levels before the next extreme warming event occurs”, the authors write.





It's time to recalibrate the navigation systems on ships, airplanes, and (given the time of year) Santa's sleigh: the position of the magnetic North Pole is officially being changed, continuing its shift away from Canada and towards Siberia.

Experts from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the British Geological Survey (BGS) have joined forces – as they do every five years – to produce a new, more accurate World Magnetic Model (WMM).

While the geographical North Pole stays fixed in place (at the very summit of the Earth's rotational axis), the WMM pinpoints the magnetic North Pole – where Earth's magnetic field points straight down, a perfectly vertical magnetic field.

And as the iron and nickel inside our planet shift, so does Earth's magnetic field, meaning the North (and South) Poles are also constantly on the move. If you're using a compass or a GPS system, knowing exactly where these points are is crucial.

"The current behaviour of magnetic north is something that we have never observed before", says global geomagnetic field modeller William Brown, from BGS.

"Magnetic north has been moving slowly around Canada since the 1500s but, in the past 20 years, it accelerated towards Siberia, increasing in speed every year until about five years ago, when it suddenly decelerated from 50 to 35 kilometers [31 to 22 miles] per year, which is the biggest deceleration in speed we've ever seen".

Research suggests that two giant magnetic lobes – one under Canada and one under Siberia – are what's driving the shifting of magnetic north. Sometimes the shifts are dramatic enough that an emergency update is required, outside of the usual 5-year cycle.

Now we have a more accurate map of magnetic north, one that should be good for another half a decade. For the first time, a higher resolution map is also available, which offers more than 10 times more detail.

We won't have to apply any updates to our own phones or sat navs – it'll all happen automatically.

The magnetic North Pole was first discovered by Sir James Clark Ross in northern Canada back in 1831.

Since then, researchers have gradually been able to track it with more precision, using ground measurements taken all across the globe as well as readings from satellites in space.


LETTURE



Secondo quanto riportato da il Guardian, l’Orwell Estate ha ufficializzato che sarà Sandra Newman a far rivivere il Grande Fratello. 

Sandra Newman riscriverà l’opera orwelliana dal punto di vista della co-protagonista del racconto originale, Julia. Una riscrittura in chiave femminile ma non solo, anche in chiave femminista.

Pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1949, il romanzo distopico 1984 è ambientato in uno stato dittatoriale che controlla ogni aspetto della vita dei suoi cittadini. Il protagonista è Winston Smith, che non è affatto un sostenitore della dittatura, e che un giorno incontra una donna, Julia, la donna di cui si innamora e con cui inizia una relazione clandestina. Winston e Julia sono insieme la notte in cui lui viene catturato e consegnato all’uomo incaricato della sua “rieducazione”.

Bill Hamilton – Literary Executor dell’Orwell Estate – ha dichiarato al The Guardian: "Ci sono due domande che restano senza risposta nel libro di Orwell: cosa Julia vede in Winston e come si è fatta strada attraverso la gerarchia del partito".

L’editore di Newman, Granta, ha dichiarato che il figlio di Orwell ha dato la sua approvazione al progetto.

Sandra Newman, nota soprattutto per "I Cieli", ha in uscita "The Men", una distopia in cui viene raccontata la storia dell’umanità dopo la scomparsa di ogni maschio dalla Terra.





Bonjour à toutes et à tous,

J’ai le grand plaisir de vous inviter à ma soutenance de thèse en philosophie, spécialité histoire des sciences et épistémologie. Mon travail, intitulé :

« Une science est née [?] » Roger Heim et les conséquences heuristiques de la découverte des champignons hallucinogènes du Mexique.

Cette thèse explore les conséquences heuristiques de la redécouverte des champignons hallucinogènes à travers les travaux du professeur Roger Heim (1900-1979). 

Au XVIe siècle et XVIIe siècle, lors de la colonisation du Mexique, des chroniqueurs européens avaient observé et décrit l'usage de ces champignons, mais ce n'est qu'au milieu du XXe siècle que l'intérêt scientifique sur ceux-ci renaît, grâce aux recherches des époux Wasson, pionniers de l’ethnomycologie. 

Roger Heim, mycologue et professeur au Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, joua un rôle déterminant dans cette redécouverte, en menant et en coordonnant des recherches sur les champignons hallucinogènes du Mexique, tant sur les plans ethnologique, biologique, chimique que psychologique. 

La thèse analyse le processus par lequel une expérience psychique issue des mondes amérindiens a été transférée et «naturalisée» dans la culture scientifique occidentale, à travers des recherches pluridisciplinaires qui ont également ouvert la voie à des recherches médicales. 

La thèse montre que les travaux de Heim ont entraîné une rupture épistémologique. En s'ouvrant aux pratiques divinatoires des guérisseurs mexicains et en expérimentant les effets de ces champignons, Heim a initié une reconfiguration de ses croyances métaphysiques. 

Fondée sur une analyse historique de sources variées, dont des correspondances et un film documentaire, la thèse conclut que Heim a posé les bases d'une nouvelle discipline. Bien qu'il n'ait pas su la nommer, cette science en devenir repose sur l’exploration prudente des propriétés psychotropes de la psilocybine et sur l'ouverture à l'altérité épistémique.


VISIONI





After 7 years of research, filming, and collaboration, I’m thrilled to finally share the trailer for "GenX", my four-part documentary series exploring the hidden crisis of PFAS contamination. 

This journey began as a deeply personal story—a search for answers about my mom’s rare illness—but it quickly grew into something much bigger.

PFAS (or “forever chemicals”) may seem invisible, but their impact is everywhere. 

This series sheds light on the problem and highlights real solutions, offering a message of hope and action in the face of one of our most urgent environmental challenges.

"GenX: the Saga of Forever Chemicals" Elijah J Yetter-Bowman







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