cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21439893 > Meta has a Palestine problem. If you use Facebook or Instagram, you’ve probably seen the censorship yourself. Dena Takruri uncovers an internal culture of censorship, intimidation and fear within Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook. > > She speaks to Meta employees who’ve tried to fix the problem or speak out, and say they were silenced or even fired. She also investigates Meta leaders’ deep ties to Israel, which may explain why it’s suppressing and censoring Palestine content for billions of users around the world.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21271254 > Technology is playing a central role in enabling the relentless mass slaughter and destruction unleashed in Gaza. From supplying the dystopian AI systems used to automate the killing and bombing, to facilitating the spread of state-sponsored disinformation and online incitement to violence and war crimes, Big Tech is deeply embroiled in this brutal war. However, the impunity with which Israeli authorities have been allowed to wage this war has also served to shield technology companies from scrutiny. Not only have companies failed to uphold their human rights commitments in times of war, they have also dismissed, ignored, and even punished dissenting voices among their own ranks, civil society, and the public flagging their possible complicity in what the UN’s top independent expert on Palestine describes as an unfolding genocide. > > This post interrogates how technology companies can be potentially facilitating or contributing to an endless list of egregious violations of international law, including the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, currently under investigation by the ICJ and the International Criminal Court (ICC). We also provide companies with recommendations to avoid potential complicity in such violations.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21232355 > At Apple’s secretive Global Police Summit at its Cupertino headquarters, cops from seven countries learned how to use a host of Apple products like the iPhone, Vision Pro and CarPlay for surveillance and policing work.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21121074 > OpenAI, a non-profit AI company that will lose anywhere from $4 billion to $5 billion this year, will at some point in the next six or so months convert into a for-profit AI company, at which point it will continue to lose money in exactly the same way. Shortly after this news broke, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati resigned, followed by Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and VP of Research, Post Training Barret Zoph, leaving OpenAI with exactly three of its eleven cofounders remaining. > > This coincides suspiciously with OpenAI's increasingly-absurd fundraising efforts, where (as I predicted in late July) OpenAI has raised the largest venture-backed fundraise of all time $6.6 billion— at a valuation of $157 billion.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20948249 > Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20289663 > A report from Morgan Stanley suggests the datacenter industry is on track to emit 2.5 billion tons by 2030, which is three times higher than the predictions if generative AI had not come into play. > > The extra demand from GenAI will reportedly lead to a rise in emissions from 200 million tons this year to 600 million tons by 2030, thanks largely to the construction of more data centers to keep up with the demand for cloud services.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19709648 > Paris Marx is joined by Mohammad Khatami and Gabi Schubiner to discuss the complicity of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and how tech workers are organizing to stop it. > > Mohammad Khatami and Gabi Schubiner are former Google software engineers and organizers with [No Tech for Apartheid](https://www.notechforapartheid.com/).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19683130 > The ideologues of Silicon Valley are in model collapse. > > To train an AI model, you need to give it a ton of data, and the quality of output from the model depends upon whether that data is any good. A risk AI models face, especially as AI-generated output makes up a larger share of what’s published online, is “model collapse”: the rapid degradation that results from AI models being trained on the output of AI models. Essentially, the AI is primarily talking to, and learning from, itself, and this creates a self-reinforcing cascade of bad thinking. > > We’ve been watching something similar happen, in real time, with the Elon Musks, Marc Andreessens, Peter Thiels, and other chronically online Silicon Valley representatives of far-right ideology. It’s not just that they have bad values that are leading to bad politics. They also seem to be talking themselves into believing nonsense at an increasing rate. The world they seem to believe exists, and which they’re reacting and warning against, bears less and less resemblance to the actual world, and instead represents an imagined lore they’ve gotten themselves lost in.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19117230 > As X’s owner and most followed user, Elon Musk has increasingly used the social media platform as a microphone to amplify his political views and, lately, those of right-wing figures he’s aligned with. There are few modern parallels to his antics, but then again there are few modern parallels to Elon Musk himself.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/18985984 > Palantir, the company named for the dangerous seeing-stones that tended to mislead their users, has announced a partnership with Microsoft to deliver services for classified networks in US defense and intelligence agencies. > > “This is a first-of-its-kind, integrated suite of technology that will allow critical national security missions to operationalize Microsoft’s best-in-class large language models (LLMs) via Azure OpenAI Service within Palantir’s AI Platforms (AIP) in Microsoft’s government and classified cloud environments,” the announcement says. > > Palantir is a data-analysis company that sucks down huge amounts of personal data to assist governments and companies with surveillance. It is somewhat unclear from the text of the announcement what services Palantir and Microsoft will offer. What we do know is that Microsoft’s Azure cloud services will integrate Palantir products. Previously, Azure incorporated OpenAI’s Chat-GPT4 into a “top secret” version of its software.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/18923426 > The Israeli army is using Amazon’s cloud service to store surveillance information on Gaza’s population, while procuring further AI tools from Google and Microsoft for military purposes, an investigation reveals.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/18147280 > X, the social media platform owned by Trump megadonor Elon Musk, is promoting Trump campaign-curated content to all U.S. users, regardless of whether they have opted out of Trump-related content. > > On the platform formerly known as Twitter, banner ads for the Trump campaign donning the #Trump2024 tag appear for all U.S. users, even those who’ve blocked words, topics, and hashtags related to the candidate or his campaign or muted the advertiser. > > Additionally, the #MAGA tag displays an edited image of the former president from his attempted assassination and the #Trump2024 hashtag displays an American flag. > > It is unclear whether the Trump campaign paid for the images on the #Trump2024 and #MAGA tags, though an advertisement for the tag on the site’s trending page reads “Promoted by Team Trump.” As Mashable noted, it is the first time the platform has enabled the image feature to promote a specific political candidate. > > Clicking the Trump2024 tag also prompts American flag graphics to flood the screen.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16307984 > Executive summary > > The purpose of this primer is to publicly expose Microsoft’s complicity in Israeli apartheid and genocide against the people of Palestine, and to connect technology workers to the No Azure for Apartheid campaign. > Introduction > > We are [No Azure for Apartheid](https://linktr.ee/microsoftnota), a group of technology workers within Microsoft and its subsidiaries seeking to expose and condemn the specific technologies complicit in the ongoing apartheid and genocide in Gaza, the West Bank, and Palestine as a whole. We are part of the broader No Tech for Apartheid movement, which began with opposing Project Nimbus at Google and Amazon. With Microsoft leading advances in AI technology, we, as Microsoft employees, are morally obligated to guide the ethics and lasting ramifications of these technologies for the future.

The foundational tenet of “the Cult of Mac” is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur: Call it “Apple exceptionalism” – the idea that Apple, alone among the Big Tech firms, is virtuous, and therefore its conduct should be interpreted through that lens of virtue. The wellspring of this virtue is conveniently nebulous, which allows for endless goal-post shifting by members of the Cult of Mac when Apple’s sins are made manifest. Take the claim that Apple is “privacy respecting,” which is attributed to Apple’s business model of financing its services though cash transactions, rather than by selling it customers to advertisers. This is the (widely misunderstood) crux of the “surveillance capitalism” hypothesis: that capitalism is just fine, but once surveillance is in the mix, capitalism fails.

We don’t have to look too deeply into history to find parallels to this kind of worldview. Simply put, it is the worldview of colonialism: it sees both nature and other people as domains to be conquered and exploited for “growth”.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/7481270 > Automated image generators are often accused of spreading harmful stereotypes, but studies usually only look at MidJourney. Other tools make serious efforts to increase diversity in their output, but effective remedies remain elusive.

Thursday on X (Twitter), all users saw the same pinned topic under the “What’s happening?” sidebar. As part of a “timeline takeover” — which gives advertisers “priority access to logged-in users’ first impression of the day” — conservative media nonprofit PragerU is promoting the hashtag “#DETRANS” to advertise its new film about “the stories of detransitioners.”

Do you support sustainability, social responsibility, tech ethics, or trust and safety? Congratulations, you’re an enemy of progress. That’s according to the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5486771 > We did an analysis of the Google antitrust trial. Last week, over half of the trial was held behind closed doors because the judge, Amit Mehta, is deferring to Google on the need for secrecy.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5431344 > The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. It doesn't have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four" (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don't have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5400607 > This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons, where a common resource is harmed by the profit interests of individuals. The traditional example of this is a public field that cattle can graze upon. Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody. > > We have commons on the internet, too. Despite all of its toxic corners, it is still full of vibrant portions that serve the public good — places like Wikipedia and Reddit forums, where volunteers often share knowledge in good faith and work hard to keep bad actors at bay. > > But these commons are now being overgrazed by rapacious tech companies that seek to feed all of the human wisdom, expertise, humor, anecdotes and advice they find in these places into their for-profit A.I. systems.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5323962 > The Grift Shift is a new paradigm of debating technologies within a society that is based a lot less on the actual realistic use cases or properties of a certain technology but a surface level fascination with technologies but even more their narratives of future deliverance. Within the Grift Shift paradigm the topics and technologies addressed are mere material for public personalities to continuously claim expertise and “thought leadership” in every cycle of the shift regardless of what specific technologies are being talked about.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2811405 > "We view this moment of hype around generative AI as dangerous. There is a pack mentality in rushing to invest in these tools, while overlooking the fact that they threaten workers and impact consumers by creating lesser quality products and allowing more erroneous outputs. For example, earlier this year America’s National Eating Disorders Association fired helpline workers and attempted to replace them with a chatbot. The bot was then shut down after its responses actively encouraged disordered eating behaviors. "

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2757988 > "When we let corporations decide who is allowed to speak, they act with a mixture of carelessness and self-interest, becoming off-the-books deputies of authoritarian regimes and corrupt, powerful elites. > > Alas, we made the wrong tradeoff with Trusted Computing. For the past twenty years, Trusted Computing has been creeping into our devices, albeit in somewhat denatured form. " > > "As I wrote last week, giving manufacturers the power to decide how your computer is configured, overriding your own choices, is a bad tradeoff - the worst tradeoff, a greased slide into terminal enshittification"

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605 > A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.