Notices by Pratik Patel (ppatel@mstdn.social)

How “personhood credentials” could help prove you’re a human online

A system proposed by researchers from MIT, OpenAI, Microsoft and others could curb the use of deceptive AI by exploiting the technology’s weaknesses

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/02/1103466/how-personhood-credentials-could-help-prove-youre-a-human-online/

Well then.

“we demonstrate that language models embody covert racism in the form of dialect prejudice, exhibiting raciolinguistic stereotypes about speakers of African American English (AAE) that are more negative than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded”

#Linguistics #AI #Tech

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07856-5

The startup offering free toilets and coffee for delivery workers — in exchange for their data

Argentine startup Nippy aggregates data from gig workers and sells it to companies like Mastercard and Movistar, who in turn offer workers their services.

https://restofworld.org/2024/gig-worker-rest-stop-nippy/

*None* of the #AI hardware including the Humane pin, Rabbit R1, this newly announced Frame glasses, or Facebook's glasses is accessible for #blind people. You'd think the interfaces would be made accessible. But none of these products have #accessibility built in for the setup or the connecting apps. In case you're wondering, I've specifically asked each of the companies.

@heydon Despite so much evidence, people just refuse to listen. CAPTCHA companies have no incentive to tell implementers that the crap tun of data collected by people solving CAPTCHAs is their business model.

If there's anything that makes you feel inadequate is trying to deal with inaccessible CAPTCHA page again and again followed by stupid bureaucracy.

You know how X, the site formerly known as Twitter, can't collect your biometric data or other data?

1. Don't login to the site in any way whatsoever.

2. Delete your account if you still have it.

3. Delete the hidden account that you didn't think we knew about.

4. If you still have your Twitter app installed on any of your devices, delete that too.

5. Don't be tempted to create a new account.

I have two linked announcements:

I'm unofficially/officially retiring from freelancing as an #accessibility consultant. The decision has been long in coming. While I will always continue to care about accessibility work, I no longer find it fulfilling. I will continue to be involved in projects that highly interest me as I've been doing for a couple of years now.

I'll focus instead on mentoring, leadership, executive training/coaching and other such work.

Part 2 coming soon!

#a11y #careers

People of the #fediverse, especially those creating various services, there are alternatives to HCAPTCHA when you ask people to create accounts or login. Despite HCAPTCHA's propaganda, HCAPTCHA is not truly accessible to #blind people. It requires us to give up our privacy if we choose the cookie option. The text alternative doesn't work most times. I just tried to sign up for a /kbin server at https://redit.buzz and wasted 30 mins on HCAPTCHA.

Please be #inclusive!

#accessibility

@aral Also, if your instance is running version 4.1.0 of #Mastodon which was recently released, you can edit your post and add alt text if you've forgotten it or if you need to edit a previous post. This used to be a difficult process in previous version of Mastodon.

#accessibility