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"The judge also wants the app wiped from existing users' smartphones and tablets, though it's unclear which users that would apply to. It's also unknown at this point whether the judge has the power to enforce this ban and what the chances are of it going through. The report stated that three app store providers could be subject to a fine of 20,000 Brazilian real (about $9,000) for every day the app remains available for download after the 10-day period starting with Wednesday. The judge argues that the app violates Brazil's constitution The judge argues that the app violates Brazil's constitution, which states freedom of expression cannot be promoted if it's done anonymously."

Yikes - getting scarier by the year...

"Turkey has finally restored access to YouTube, 67 days after the government blocked the video-sharing website. The Turkey's telecommunications authority (TIB) lifted the ban on Tuesday, removing YouTube from the "blocked sites" listed on its website. The move came four days after the country's Constitutional Court ruled that the ban violated Turks' free speech rights and ordered the ban be lifted."

"The problem with digital technology is that, for engineers, it is both intrinsically fascinating and seductively challenging, which means that they acquire a kind of tunnel vision: they are so focused on finding solutions to the technical problems that they are blinded to the wider context. At the moment, for example, the consensus-establishing processes for verifying blockchain transactions requires intensive computation, with a correspondingly heavy carbon footprint. Reducing that poses intriguing technical challenges, but focusing on them means that the engineering community isn't thinking about the governance issues raised by the technology. There may not be any central authority in a blockchain but, as Vili Lehdonvirta pointed out years ago, there are rules for what constitutes a consensus and, therefore, a question about who exactly sets those rules. The engineers? The owners of the biggest supercomputers on the chain? Goldman Sachs? These are ultimately political questions, not technical ones."

"Universities don't merely face essays or assignments entirely generated by algorithms: they must also adjudicate a myriad of more subtle problems. For instance, AI-powered word processors habitually suggest alternatives to our ungrammatical phrases. But if software can algorithmically rewrite a student's sentence, why shouldn't it do the same with a paragraph - and if a paragraph, why not a page? At what point does the intrusion of AI constitute cheating?"

"Since its inception, facial recognition technology has been met with equal doses of skepticism and controversy. One company scraped billions of photos from social media without the public's knowledge, building a near-universal facial recognition application and inciting cries of infringement on constitutional freedom and exacerbation of racial biases."

"The constitutional right to safe, legal abortion has evaporated following the recent Supreme Court decision. Some states with so-called "trigger bans" have immediately criminalized abortion. Next, Congress may seek to criminalize abortion in all 50 states, putting the government in control of peoples' bodies. Google is fully complicit in the criminalization of people seeking abortion care. That's because Google stores historical location data about hundreds of millions of smartphone users, which it routinely shares with government agencies through "geofence" orders that unmask the identities of anyone who traveled to a specific place at a specific time-like an abortion clinic on a specific day. Google received 11,554 such geofence warrants in 2020."

"They said that a number of schools were reporting for the first time that pupils were using AI-generating technology to create images of children that legally constituted child sexual abuse material. Emma Hardy, UK Safer Internet Centre (UKSIC) director, said the pictures were "terrifyingly" realistic. "The quality of the images that we're seeing is comparable to professional photos taken annually of children in schools up and down the country," said Hardy, who is also the Internet Watch Foundation communications director."