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"A story on the site of the Japanese broadcaster NHK shows how this is playing out in the world of social networks. Online criticism of the behavior of the President of South Korea following the sinking of the ferry MV Sewol prompted the government to set up a team to monitor online activity. That, in its turn, has led people to seek what the NHK article calls "cyber-asylum" -- online safety through the use of foreign mobile messaging services, which aren't spied on so easily by the South Korean authorities. According to the NHK article: Many users have switched [from the hugely-popular home-grown product KakaoTalk] to a German chat app called Telegram. It had 50,000 users in early September. Now 2 million people have signed up."

"Given the complexity of the law, and the preference for simplicity when it comes to AI programming, it's an ambitious project. "We'd like to expand to other areas of civil law, and we're already in touch with German universities," Bull says. "But we're not out to make a program that provides a too-complex analysis. We really want to keep it as a starting point for victims.""

"German government officials have said they are investigating an unprecedented proliferation of fake news items amid reports of Russian efforts to influence the country's election later this year."

"Chaos Computer Club, Europe's largest association of hackers, claims it can reproduce your fingerprints from a couple of photos that show your fingers. At the 31st annual Chaos Computer Club convention in Hamburg, Germany, Jan Krissler, also known by his alias "Starbug," explained how he copied the thumbprint of German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen"

"It's an old cliché of security researchers: fingerprints might appear more secure than passwords. But if your password gets stolen, you can change it to a new one; what happens when your fingerprint gets copied?"

"German Green party MP, Malte Spitz, went a step further and published 6 months of records kept (at the time by law) by his phone company about him. To emphasise how scary it was privacy-wise he published it in the form of a minute by minute interactive map, so anyone could follow his exact location (just like the phone company) as though in real time from the location metadata his phone was giving away all the time. The metadata was combined with his freely available social networking data, allowing anyone to see not just where he was but often what he was doing. Germany no longer requires phone companies to keep this metadata, but other countries have antiterrorist laws that require similar information to be kept for everyone. You can explore Malte's movements at (archived link: www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention) to get an idea of how your life is being tracked by metadata."

"Most AI programs function like a "black box." "We know exactly what a model does but not why it has now specifically recognized that a picture shows a cat," said computer scientist Kristian Kersting of the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany to the German-language newspaper Handelsblatt. That dilemma prompted Kersting-along with computer scientists Patrick Schramowski of the Technical University of Darmstadt and Björn Deiseroth, Mayukh Deb and Samuel Weinbach, all at the Heidelberg, Germany-based AI company Aleph Alpha-to introduce an algorithm called AtMan earlier this year. AtMan allows large AI systems such as ChatGPT, Dall-E and Midjourney to finally explain their outputs."

"Google has put a temporary block on its new artificial intelligence model producing images of people after it portrayed German second world war soldiers and Vikings as people of colour. The tech company said it would stop its Gemini model generating images of people after social media users posted examples of images generated by the tool that depicted some historical figures - including popes and the founding fathers of the US - in a variety of ethnicities and genders."

People in Germany are being warned about the risks of security when using Internet Explorer. Apparently anyone using versions six through eight are at risk, and are being advised to use another browser.