A more interesting “bear case” for AI is that, if you look at the list of industries that leading AIs like GPT-4 are capable of disrupting—and therefore making money off of—the list is lackluster from a return-on-investment perspective, because the industries themselves are not very lucrative. What are AIs of the GPT-4 generation best at? It’s things like:

writing essays or short fictions

digital art

chatting

programming assistance

Researchers in the UK claim to have translated the sound of laptop keystrokes into their corresponding letters with 95 percent accuracy in some cases.

That 95 percent figure was achieved with nothing but a nearby iPhone. Remote methods are just as dangerous: over Zoom, the accuracy of recorded keystrokes only dropped to 93 percent, while Skype calls were still 91.7 percent accurate.

In other words, this is a side channel attack with considerable accuracy, minimal technical requirements, and a ubiquitous data exfiltration point: Microphones, which are everywhere from our laptops, to our wrists, to the very rooms we work in.

Die Virologin Monika Redlberger-Fritz empfiehlt eine Wiedereinführung der Maskenpflicht in Arztpraxen und Spitälern aus. Die Betreiber sollen von ihrem Hausrecht Gebrauch machen. Damit könnten insbesondere in starken Wellen vulnerable Gruppen geschützt werden.

The European Union continues on its path to eIDAS 2.0, which includes the controversial Article 45 that basically tells browsers which certification authorities (CAs) to trust. eIDAS, which stands for electronic identification and trust services, is a framework aimed at regulating electronic transactions. As part of this proposal, the EU wants to support embedding identities in website certificates. In essence, the goal is to bring back Extended Validation (EV) certificates.

Browsers—of course—don’t want that, but the real problem is the fact that, with the legal text as it is at the moment, in its near-final form, the EU gets the final say in which CAs are trusted. The global security community has been fighting against Article 45 for more than two years now; we wrote about it on a couple of occasions. As of November 2023, the European Council and Parliament have reached a provisional agreement. The next step is for the law to be put to the vote, which is usually a formality.

Not all ads are created equally sleazy. The privacy harms from surveillance ads, though real, are often hard to pin down. But there's another kind of ad – or "ad" that picks your pocket every time you use an ecommerce site.

This is the "sponsored listing" ad, which allows merchants to bid to be among the top-ranked items in response to your searches – whether or not their products are a good match for your query. These aren't "ads" in the way that, say, a Facebook ad is an ad. These are more #payola, a form of bribery that's actually a crime (but not when Amazon does it).

Amazon is the global champion of payola. It boasts of $31 billion in annual "ad" revenue. That's $31 billion that Amazon sellers have to recoup from you. But Amazon's use of "most favored nation" deals (which requires sellers to offer their lowest prices on Amazon) mean that you don't see those price-hikes because sellers raise their prices everywhere.

In Ungarn fährt die rechtspopulistische Regierung unter Premier Viktor Orban derzeit eine neue geballte Kampagne auf mehreren Ebenen. NGOs und Medien zittern vor einem neuen Gesetz, das ihnen Handlungsfreiheit und Finanzmittel nehmen soll. Gleichzeitig wird – teils mit offenkundigen Unwahrheiten – wieder verstärkt Stimmung gegen die EU gemacht.