Notices by Lukasz Olejnik (lukaszolejnik@mastodon.social)

"The theft-prevention system installed in Seattle rental cars by a car-sharing company was designed to prevent cars being towed away by thieves. It disabled the cars remotely if they were detected to be moving with the engine off. Renters taking the boat ferry found themselves unable to restart their cars when the ferry docked. An anti-theft system in a car caused major delays to a regional ferry system" https://www.ft.com/content/178ab808-21ff-4ac2-a81f-f831326c22d4

The US military tracked Putin's movements. How? His comrades (advisers, drivers, etc.) had smartphones and were browsing the internet, using apps. Ads were displayed to them. And data traces from advertising networks revealed everything. https://www.wired.com/story/how-pentagon-learned-targeted-ads-to-find-targets-and-vladimir-putin/

You may criticise Apple Vision but live captioning during talk is a critical life changer for persona with hearing disability. Of course this may hold implications for privacy and data protection. Accessibility tradeoff. https://twitter.com/jordibruin/status/1753071814887231890/video/1

Incidentally, Google caused an information disruption in Poland. Yesterday evening/overnight, for unknown reasons the currency rate for EUR/PLN went from ~4.3 to ~5.9, which is a huge change. Some people feared a major financial crisis happening. "Bug"? Now Google "fixed" the issue but we see the trace here. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/EUR-PLN?hl=en

Significant GPS outage over Poland, Denmark, Sweden. Source unknown. https://gpsjam.org/?lat=53.67154&lon=17.62490&z=4.8&date=2023-12-26

Meta/Facebook uses users' Facebook posts and Instagram photos to train their AI models. They have it all for free. Obvious profit. Indeed, soon they will even want to pay a fee for using Facebook/Instagram :)

10 years ago we were concerned by exploitation of data for advertising purposes. Today it's life mining to process data to use as theirs by "AI" "models"? Privacy research becomes issue of human dignity.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/metas-new-ai-chatbot-trained-public-facebook-instagram-posts-2023-09-28/ #GDPR #digitalservicesact #aiact #ai #artificialintelligence

Wait, what?
No. No,
NO NO NO.

Meta allows to turn OFF display of posts using recommender/AI algorithm. Applies to Instagram and Facebook. Finally! This is a requirement of the Digital Services Act / Digital Services Act. They also release AI-System cards. #DSA https://about.fb.com/news/2023/08/new-features-and-additional-transparency-measures-as-the-digital-services-act-comes-into-effect https://transparency.fb.com/features/explaining-ranking

Soviet-style joke in China

After finding a genie lamp “... out popped a genie! The genie said it could grant me any wish. ‘Is that so?’ I said. ‘Well then, could you make you-know-who you-know-what?’ No sooner had the words escaped my lips than the genie rushed over, clamped my mouth shut, and asked: ‘Are we even allowed to say that?’”

The author’s account appears to have been shut down after the joke was deleted. “Of course, by ban­ning the joke and its author, cen­sors proved the punch­line”

Misinformation, or at least confusion or badly informed policy-making, spread by European Commission.

They use the buzzword term "web 4.0" (39 times!). Problem? It does not exist! In line with @w3c Technical Architecture Group documents, there is only one web. https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/redirection/document/97337

US Congress to consider a law to require that websites and apps storing information collected in the People’s Republic of China to disclose that such information is stored and maintained in the PRC and whether the Chinese Communist Party has access to such information. https://democrats-energycommerce.house.gov/sites/democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/files/documents/H.R.%20742%20-%20Telling%20Everyone%20the%20Location%20of%20data%20Leaving%20the%20U.S.%20Act”%20or%20the%20“TELL%20Act.pdf