Surfing the Broadband Bit Stream

After a federal judge ruled in August that Google is illegally monopolizing the search engine market, the Department of Justice is now saying the company must be reined in.

One of the most brazen lies of Big Tech is that people like commercial surveillance, a fact you can verify for yourself by simply observing how many people end up using products that spy on them. If they didn’t like spying, they wouldn’t opt into being spied on.

This lie has spread to the law enforcement and national security agencies, who treasure Big Tech’s surveillance as an off-the-books trove of warrantless data that no court would ever permit them to gather on their own. Back in 2017, I found myself at SXSW, debating an FBI agent who was defending the Bureau’s gigantic facial recognition database, which, he claimed, contained the faces of virtually every American:

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/mar/11/sxsw-facial-recognition-biometrics-surveillance-panel

The agent insisted that the FBI had acquired all those faces through legitimate means, by accessing public sources of people’s faces. In other words, we’d all opted in to FBI facial recognition surveillance. “Sure,” I said, “to opt out, just don’t have a face.”

Artificial intelligence was supposed to upend this election, with convincing fake news content flummoxing and misleading voters as they cast their all-important ballots.

It still might. But with a little less than a month before Election Day, it’s hurricane news that most acutely highlights the information crisis the world is facing.

An AI-generated image of a little girl fleeing Hurricane Helene while clutching a puppy went viral in right-wing circles last week, with Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) posting it on (and later deleting it from) X. But in a sea of defensive statements and apologies, one comment stood out above all others in revealing the inconvenient truth at the heart of digital “misinformation.”

“Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” wrote Amy Kremer, Republican National Committeewoman for the Georgia GOP and co-founder of Women for Trump. “I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.”

In other words: What matters isn’t whether something is true, just whether it feels true.

This is not just an AI problem. JD Vance recently doubled down on false, outlandish immigrant-baiting stories by saying it was necessary “to create stories so that … media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.”

Demonstration of Nokia 50G PON solution enables Centranet to become the first company to connect a pilot subscriber in a tribal nation to a 50Gbps fiber connection.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page plan for a radical government takeover of America, is not just some right-wing fever dream full of extreme policy ideas that could never become reality.

The Project 2025 agenda is already taking root in many states such as Texas, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, and more. Taking freedom away from individuals and giving more to corporations; ripping reproductive rights away from women; endangering worker safety; outlawing local living wage minimums or the ability for businesses to voluntarily recognize unions; centralizing power away from the people; fomenting retributive political violence; prosecuting librarians over books radical extremists have deemed obscene or dangerous: This is the future the extreme far right wants for all Americans—and it has already succeeded in making it a reality for many.

This column outlines how states are passing extreme policies—including some reflecting those presented in Project 2025—targeting all areas of Americans’ lives, from reproductive rights and democracy to the economy and education.

Nowadays we're expected to provide an ever-expanding universe of passwords:: uppercase, lowercase, numbers, your first pet's zodiac sign, and probably a blood sacrifice too.

Adobe is expanding its plans to fix online content attribution, making it easier for creatives to label their work and opt out of AI training.

Joshua Rothman joins Geoffrey Hinton on his island and learns why the neural-network pioneer thinks A.I. systems, like Open AI’s ChatGPT, could grow too smart to remain under our control.

State-affiliated Chinese hackers penetrated AT&T, Verizon, Lumen and others; they entered their networks and spent months intercepting US traffic — from individuals, firms, government officials, etc — and they did it all without having to exploit any code vulnerabilities. Instead, they used the back door that the FBI requires every carrier to furnish:

https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/u-s-wiretap-systems-targeted-in-china-linked-hack-327fc63b?st=C5ywbp&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

In 1994, Bill Clinton signed CALEA into law. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires every US telecommunications network to be designed around facilitating access to law-enforcement wiretaps. Prior to CALEA, telecoms operators were often at pains to design their networks to resist infiltration and interception. Even if a telco didn’t go that far, they were at the very least indifferent to the needs of law enforcement, and attuned instead to building efficient, robust networks.

Predictably, CALEA met stiff opposition from powerful telecoms companies as it worked its way through Congress, but the Clinton administration bought them off with hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to acquire wiretap-facilitation technologies. Immediately, a new industry sprang into being; companies that promised to help the carriers hack themselves, punching back doors into their networks. The pioneers of this dirty business were overwhelmingly founded by ex-Israeli signals intelligence personnel, though they often poached senior American military and intelligence officials to serve as the face of their operations and liase with their former colleagues in law enforcement and intelligence.

Telcos weren’t the only opponents of CALEA, of course. Security experts — those who weren’t hoping to cash in on government pork, anyways — warned that there was no way to make a back door that was only useful to the “good guys” but would keep the “bad guys” out.

Appearing onstage with former President Donald Trump on Sunday evening, Elon Musk seemed to incarnate the fusion of right-wing conservatism and futurist politics that’s defined much of this GOP campaign.

Just two years ago, when he bought Twitter, Musk took pains to seem like he was above conventional party politics — he reminded people he voted Democrat more than Republican, and recommended voting for Republicans only to “curb the worst excesses of both parties.”

Now the the world’s richest man and self-styled free thinker is hard to distinguish from the anonymous trolls he once decried on his platform. Musk literally jumped around on stage with Trump, awkwardly proclaimed himself “dark MAGA” and in his brief remarks in Butler, Penn. offered a series of generic Trumpworld talking points. He invoked in heroic terms Trump’s defiant fist pump after he survived a July assassination attempt; he declared that “this election is the most important election of our lifetime” and that “the other side wants to take away your freedom of speech.”

And there’s more of that on the way: Today POLITICO’s Alex Isenstadt reported that Musk plans to make repeated stops in Pennsylvania over the last four weeks before the election with the backing of his pro-Trump America PAC.

The new statute violates "bedrock principles of constitutional law and precedent from across the nation," NetChoice says in a lawsuit brought Thursday in Nashville federal court.

The Authors Guild will offer its 15,000 members a new certificate to place book covers: one that shows a book is written by humans.

TikTok is aware that "compulsive use" of the platform is "wreaking havoc on the mental health of millions of American children and teenagers," New York's attorney general claims in a new lawsuit
against the company.

More frequent severe storms mean there are, unfortunately, more opportunities to learn how to better estimate economic damage.

Cognitive scientist and prominent AI researcher Gary Marcus believes that OpenAI will pivot into the surveillance business.

Two Harvard students recently revealed that it's possible to combine Meta smart glasses with face image search technology to "reveal anyone's personal details," including their name, address, and phone number, "just from looking at them."

In a Google document, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they linked a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to an invasive face search engine called PimEyes to help identify strangers by cross-searching their information on various people-search databases. They then used a large language model (LLM) to rapidly combine all that data, making it possible to dox someone in a glance or surface information to scam someone in seconds—or other nefarious uses, such as "some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told 404 Media.

OpenAI built a reputation for making bold research bets before others. After a recent brain drain, it needs to attract a new generation of researchers to keep this going.

OpenAI announced a partnership with Hearst, the media conglomerate behind outlets like the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire and others.

OpenAI’s spree of licensing agreements is paying off already—at least in terms of getting publishers to lower their guard.

As consumers continue to face higher prices for groceries and other goods, the Federal Trade Commission is looking at whether some of those price hikes are driven by profiteering.

The agency is “using all of our tools to make sure that no American is paying more because of illegal business practices, be it at the grocery store, be it at the pump, be it at the pharmacy, on food and groceries in particular,” FTC Chair Lina Khan told reporters Thursday during a visit to Wisconsin.

Khan was in the Badger State for stops that included a round table discussion about a recent nursing home sale and a chat with reporters at the Madison office of Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan.

Spectrum now includes Broadcast TV and regional sports fees in its advertised prices. Other cable and satellite providers will have to follow.