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Ed Webb

Op-Ed Columnist - Tear Down This Cyberwall! - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...18kristof.html

kristof Iran twitter censorship opinion USA

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Jun 09 - Cached
  • The push to remove witnesses may be the prelude to a Tehran Tiananmen. Yet a secret Internet lifeline remains, and it’s a tribute to the crazy, globalized world we live in. The lifeline was designed by Chinese computer engineers in America to evade Communist Party censorship of a repressed Chinese spiritual group, the Falun Gong.Today, it is these Chinese supporters of Falun Gong who are the best hope for Iranians trying to reach blocked sites.“We don’t have the heart to cut off the Iranians,” said Shiyu Zhou, a computer scientist and leader in the Chinese effort, called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium. “But if our servers overload too much, we may have to cut down the traffic.”
  • China is fighting back against the “hacktivists.” The government has announced that new computers sold beginning next month will have to have Internet filtering software, called Green Dam (the consortium has already developed software called Green Tsunami to neutralize it). More alarming, in 2006 a consortium engineer living outside Atlanta was attacked in his home, beaten up and his computers stolen. The engineers behind Freegate are now careful not to disclose their physical locations.
  • bullets usually trump tweets
Ed Webb

Signal asks users to set up TLS proxy servers to help Iranians 'bypass' censorship | Mi... - 0 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...roxy-servers-bypass-censorship

Iran socialmedia censorship politics election

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Signal has asked users to set up TLS proxy servers to help Iranians bypass censorship of the app, after Iran blocked the encrypted messaging platform. 
  • Signal said it was "working around Iran's censorship" after becoming the most downloaded app on Iranian app stores.
  • Thousands of Iranians flocked to Signal after Facebook-owned WhatsApp announced plans to overhaul its privacy policy. 
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  • An Iranian filtering committee blocked Signal after it alleged the app hosted "criminal content". However, neither the government nor the judiciary, which both sit on the committee, are taking responsibility for the move. An Iranian judiciary spokesperson distanced himself from blocking Signal, saying it had not "blocked any media, news outlet or messaging service" since 2019.  The "Identifying the Criminal Content Working Group" consists of six government ministers and seven officials from other authorities.
  • Signal was previously blocked between 2016 and 2017. It joins Telegram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, which Iranian authorities have also blocked. 
  • An analyst close to the government told Middle East Eye the judiciary and hardliners were determined to make Iranians pessimistic about reformist candidates ahead of June's presidential elections.  "As Rouhani is close to the end of his tenure, the judiciary and hardliners are determined to make sure Rouhani has no encouraging legacy to make people totally pessimistic about reformists and moderates," said the analyst.  Rouhani has two legacies, according to the analyst: "One is the 2015 nuclear deal, which is somehow in intensive care, and the other is his striving to keep social networks open and unblocked."
Ed Webb

AI Causes Real Harm. Let's Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype - Scientific Ame... - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...ot-imaginary-existential-risks

opinion analysis AI class race computing propaganda science

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • Wrongful arrests, an expanding surveillance dragnet, defamation and deep-fake pornography are all actually existing dangers of so-called “artificial intelligence” tools currently on the market. That, and not the imagined potential to wipe out humanity, is the real threat from artificial intelligence.
  • Beneath the hype from many AI firms, their technology already enables routine discrimination in housing, criminal justice and health care, as well as the spread of hate speech and misinformation in non-English languages. Already, algorithmic management programs subject workers to run-of-the-mill wage theft, and these programs are becoming more prevalent.
  • Corporate AI labs justify this posturing with pseudoscientific research reports that misdirect regulatory attention to such imaginary scenarios using fear-mongering terminology, such as “existential risk.”
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  • Because the term “AI” is ambiguous, it makes having clear discussions more difficult. In one sense, it is the name of a subfield of computer science. In another, it can refer to the computing techniques developed in that subfield, most of which are now focused on pattern matching based on large data sets and the generation of new media based on those patterns. Finally, in marketing copy and start-up pitch decks, the term “AI” serves as magic fairy dust that will supercharge your business.
  • output can seem so plausible that without a clear indication of its synthetic origins, it becomes a noxious and insidious pollutant of our information ecosystem
  • the people selling this technology propose that text synthesis machines could fix various holes in our social fabric: the lack of teachers in K–12 education, the inaccessibility of health care for low-income people and the dearth of legal aid for people who cannot afford lawyers, just to name a few
  • Not only do we risk mistaking synthetic text for reliable information, but also that noninformation reflects and amplifies the biases encoded in its training data—in this case, every kind of bigotry exhibited on the Internet. Moreover the synthetic text sounds authoritative despite its lack of citations back to real sources. The longer this synthetic text spill continues, the worse off we are, because it gets harder to find trustworthy sources and harder to trust them when we do.
  • the systems rely on enormous amounts of training data that are stolen without compensation from the artists and authors who created it in the first place
  • the task of labeling data to create “guardrails” that are intended to prevent an AI system’s most toxic output from seeping out is repetitive and often traumatic labor carried out by gig workers and contractors, people locked in a global race to the bottom for pay and working conditions.
  • employers are looking to cut costs by leveraging automation, laying off people from previously stable jobs and then hiring them back as lower-paid workers to correct the output of the automated systems. This can be seen most clearly in the current actors’ and writers’ strikes in Hollywood, where grotesquely overpaid moguls scheme to buy eternal rights to use AI replacements of actors for the price of a day’s work and, on a gig basis, hire writers piecemeal to revise the incoherent scripts churned out by AI.
  • too many AI publications come from corporate labs or from academic groups that receive disproportionate industry funding. Much is junk science—it is nonreproducible, hides behind trade secrecy, is full of hype and uses evaluation methods that lack construct validity
  • We urge policymakers to instead draw on solid scholarship that investigates the harms and risks of AI—and the harms caused by delegating authority to automated systems, which include the unregulated accumulation of data and computing power, climate costs of model training and inference, damage to the welfare state and the disempowerment of the poor, as well as the intensification of policing against Black and Indigenous families. Solid research in this domain—including social science and theory building—and solid policy based on that research will keep the focus on the people hurt by this technology.
Ed Webb

Arrest of Telegram channel operator surprises Iranians - 1 views

www.al-monitor.com/...legram-operator-iran-iraq.html

Iran Iraq France media socialmedia censorship IRGC

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The arrest of an operator of a popular Telegram channel on Oct. 14 shocked many Iranian dissidents abroad. Rohollah Zam, the administrator of Amad News, was residing in France as a political refugee when the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Intelligence Organization announced his arrest and shortly thereafter aired a video confession. Many dissidents and observers abroad wondered how someone could be apprehended by the IRGC in the relative safety of Europe. According to BBC Persian, Zam was arrested in Iraq and handed over to Iranian authorities. Zam reportedly flew to Iraq on Oct. 12, according to BBC Persian. One day after his arrival his wife, Mahsa Razani, lost contact with him. It is not yet clear what Zam was doing in Iraq or why he thought he would be safe in a country that has an extradition agreement with Iran.
  • In the video, Zam looks into the camera and says that he “regrets” his activities of the last few years. He added “it was a mistake to trust the French government,” adding, “In general trusting governments is not wise, especially those who show they have a bad relationship with the Islamic Republic, such as the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.” Zam added that he would need to “apologize to the system as a whole” for his actions.
  • Zam is the son of Mohammad Ali Zam, an influential cleric who has held important media positions within various institutions in the Islamic Republic. Mohammad Ali told the Iranian press that he had no knowledge of his son’s arrest until he saw it on the news.
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