remixtures

"A Say No to AI Art Movement has emerged in recent months, with advocates voicing particular concern about image generators that steal artwork and art styles from existing artists without their permission and without credit. Others warn that AI could replace humans as creators.

Koons, a month from his 70th birthday, said he was not overly concerned. The invention of photography in the 1800s was seen by some as the antithesis of an artist, but instead of replacing painting it led to a move away from realism towards abstraction.

“I think that if AI is able to become that type of agent, we will be able to understand, work with it, in some manner, to benefit ourselves,” he said. “Or it will have us look at our senses, which are probably lying relatively dormant. We like to think that we’re using our senses to their fullest ability, but we probably have become lazy to a certain degree, and we could only enhance that.

“Throughout history, we have always been confronted by technologies that have been enlightening and that have been very, very powerful, and they change the moment we’re living in, and they change our future. But I embrace this.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/jan/01/jeff-koons-on-why-he-has-drawn-a-red-line-on-artificial-intelligence-in-art

#AI #GenerativeAI #Art #JeffKoons

"Being an independent journalist – or an office worker if you wish – I always reasoned that I needed a decent computer and that I need to pay for quality. Between 2000 and 2017, I consumed three laptops that I bought new and which cost me around 5,000 euros in total – roughly 300 euros per year over the entire period. The average useful life of my three laptops was 5.7 years.

In 2017, somewhere between getting my office, I decided not to buy any more new laptops. Instead, I switched to a 2006 second-hand machine that I purchased online for 50 euros and which does everything that I want and need. Including a new battery and a simple hardware upgrade, I invested less than 150 euros.

If my 2006 laptop lasts as long as my other machines – if it runs for another 1.7 years – it will have cost me only 26 euros per year. That’s more than 10 times less than the cost of my previous laptops. In this article, I explain my motivations for not buying new laptops, and how you could do the same."

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/12/how-and-why-i-stopped-buying-new-laptops

#LowTech #PlannedObsolescence #Laptops #Sustainability

"Almost two years ago, Louisiana passed a law that started a wave that’s since spread across the entire U.S. south, and has changed the way people there can access adult content. As of today, Florida, Tennessee, and South Carolina join the list of 17 states that can’t access some of the most popular porn sites on the internet, because of regressive laws that claim to protect children but restrict adults’ use of the internet, instead.

That law, passed as Act 440, was introduced by “sex addiction” counselor and state representative Laurie Schegel and quickly copied across the country. The exact phrasing varies, but in most states, the details of the law are the same: Any “commercial entity” that publishes “material harmful to minors” online can be held liable—meaning, tens of thousands of dollars in fines and/or private lawsuits—if it doesn’t “perform reasonable age verification methods to verify the age of individuals attempting to access the material.”

To remain compliant with the law while protecting users’ privacy, Aylo—the company that owns Pornhub and a network of sites including Brazzers, RedTube, YouPorn, Reality Kings, and several others—is making the choice, state by state, to block users altogether."

https://www.404media.co/pornhub-is-now-blocked-in-almost-all-of-the-u-s-south/

#USA #Censorship #PoliceState #Authoritarianism #Surveillance #AgeVerification #Privacy

"Electric vehicles are expected to outsell cars with internal combustion engines in China for the first time next year, in a historic inflection point that puts the world’s biggest car market years ahead of western rivals.

China is set to smash international forecasts and Beijing’s official targets with domestic EV sales — including pure battery and plug-in hybrids — growing about 20 per cent year on year to more than 12mn cars in 2025, according to the latest estimates supplied to the Financial Times by four investment banks and research groups. The figure would be more than double the 5.9mn sold in 2022.

At the same time, sales of traditionally powered cars are expected to fall by more than 10 per cent next year to less than 11mn, reflecting a near 30 per cent plunge from 14.8mn in 2022.

Meanwhile, EV sales growth has slowed in Europe and the US, reflecting the legacy car industry’s slow embrace of new technology, uncertainty over government subsidies and rising protectionism against imports from China."

https://www.ft.com/content/0ebdd69f-68ea-40f2-981b-c583fb1478ef

#China #EVs #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming

"In the years to come, the federal government and many state governments might engage in surveillance and data gathering as they round up immigrants, punish people for seeking, providing, or assisting abortions, and attack gender-affirming health care. The government might use personal data in its effort to retaliate against those who stand in its way. Such efforts might be assisted by mobs of vigilantes who will use personal data to dox, threaten, embarrass, and harm anyone they don’t like — much like the way many people eagerly assisted totalitarian regimes in finding “undesirables” and rooting out and punishing dissenters.

Our best hope for protection is that legislators in Massachusetts and other states who are concerned about these risks take steps now to upgrade their privacy laws."

https://teachprivacy.com/privacy-in-authoritarian-times/

#Privacy #CyberSecurity #Surveillance #Authoritarianism #DataProtection

"Connected cars are great—at least until some company leaves unencrypted location data on the Internet for anyone to find. That's what happened with over 800,000 EVs manufactured by the Volkswagen Group, after Cariad, an automative software company that handles much of the development tasks for VW, left several terabytes of data unprotected on Amazon's cloud.

According to Motor1, a whistleblower gave German publication Der Spiegel and hacking collective Chaos Computer Club a heads-up about the misconfiguration. Der Spiegel and CCC then spent some time sifting through the data, with which allowed them to tie individual cars to their owners."

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/12/whistleblower-finds-unencrypted-location-data-for-800000-vw-evs/

#CyberSecurity #EVs #IoT #VW

"Tesla has replaced some of its US employees who were let go as part of a big wave of layoffs earlier this year with foreign workers using H-1B visas, which CEO Elon Musk is now campaigning to increase.

Over the last week, Elon Musk has been promoting the increase of H-1B visas, which are used to bring foreign workers into the US for “specialty occupations.”

Qualified foreign workers need to be sponsored by a company to get the visa, which lasts three years, extendable to six years, after which the holder needs to reapply.

The visa holder must maintain employment at the visa sponsor to retain the work visa. The worker would have to leave the country if the employment ends for whatever reason. This has led to some criticism as it gives tremendous power to the employer and can lead to a modern version of indentured servitude."

https://electrek.co/2024/12/30/tesla-replaced-laid-off-us-workers-with-foreign-workers-using-h-1b-visas-that-musk-want-to-increase/

#USA #Tesla #Musk #Immigration #H1BVisa

"Chinese state-sponsored hackers breached the U.S. Treasury Department's computer security guardrails this month and stole documents in what Treasury called a "major incident," according to a letter to lawmakers, opens new tab that Treasury officials provided to Reuters on Monday.

The hackers compromised third-party cybersecurity service provider BeyondTrust and were able to access unclassified documents, the letter said.

According to the letter, hackers "gained access to a key used by the vendor to secure a cloud-based service used to remotely provide technical support for Treasury Departmental Offices (DO) end users. With access to the stolen key, the threat actor was able to override the service’s security, remotely access certain Treasury DO user workstations, and access certain unclassified documents maintained by those users."

"Based on available indicators, the incident has been attributed to a China state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor," the letter said."

https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/us-treasurys-workstations-hacked-cyberattack-by-china-afp-reports-2024-12-30/

#USA #China #StateHacking #CyberSecurity #USTreasury #BeyondTrust

"In her remarks, Neuberger confirmed that nine telecommunications providers were impacted by the breaches, adding one more firm to the eight she acknowledged earlier this month. She noted that guidance was given to key U.S. telecommunications firms early on — a “hunting guide” and a “hardening guide” — that detailed Chinese hacking methods and allowed companies to “look for those techniques in their networks and call for help if they discover it.” This led to the determination that a ninth telco provider had been impacted by the same Salt Typhoon breach, alongside Lumen Technologies, AT&T, Verizon and others.

It’s unclear if the Chinese hackers have been fully evicted from all of the U.S. telecommunications networks. Earlier this month, Neuberger said that none of the providers have managed to oust the Chinese hackers from their networks, an assertion that some of the providers, including Lumen and AT&T, have refuted.

Neuberger explained that once Chinese hackers infiltrated telecommunication networks, they essentially had “broad and full access” to American data, which allowed them to “geolocate millions of individuals” and “record phone calls at will.”"

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/27/chinese-hackers-telco-access-00196082

#CyberSecurity #China #SaltTyphoon #USA #BigTelco #StateHacking

"Quien sí piensa que Pegasus se debe prohibir es Claudiu Dan Gheorghe, exingeniero jefe de WhatsApp. Pero el software de espionaje comercial funciona precisamente porque trabaja sobre monocultivos: un agujero de seguridad en WhatsApp abre la puerta a 2.000 millones de usuarios. Un fallo de seguridad en Android abre 2.500 millones de teléfonos a la vez. Las empresas como Google, Apple y Meta invierten mucho presupuesto luchando contra estos ataques y comprando agujeros de seguridad en un mercado caliente y competitivo. Al final, Pegasus está en el mismo negocio que WhatsApp —espiar al usuario a través de sus propios dispositivos—, pero no existiría sin él. Los dos son la verdadera amenaza contra nuestro modelo de sociedad."

https://elpais.com/opinion/2024-12-30/la-vigilancia-que-devoro-occidente.html

#CyberSecurity #Surveillance #Spyware #NSOGroup #Pegasus #WhatsApp

"If you’ve purchased a car made in the last decade or so, it’s likely jam-packed with enough technology to make your brand new phone jealous. Modern cars have sensors, cameras, GPS for location tracking, and more, all collecting data—and it turns out in many cases, sharing it.

While we’ve been keeping an eye on the evolving state of car privacy for years, everything really took off after a New York Times report this past March found that the car maker G.M. was sharing information about driver’s habits with insurance companies without consent.

It turned out a number of other car companies were doing the same by using deceptive design so people didn’t always realize they were opting into the program. We walked through how to see for yourself what data your car collects and shares. That said, cars, infotainment systems, and car maker’s apps are so unstandardized it’s often very difficult for drivers to research, let alone opt out of data sharing.

Which is why we were happy to see Senators Ron Wyden and Edward Markey send a letter to the Federal Trade Commision urging it to investigate these practices. The fact is: car makers should not sell our driving and location history to data brokers or insurance companies, and they shouldn’t make it as hard as they do to figure out what data gets shared and with whom."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/12/cars-and-drivers-2024-year-review

#Cars #EVs #Surveillance #Privacy #DataProtection #USA

"EFF’s attorneys, activists, and technologists were media rockstars in 2024, informing the public about important issues that affect privacy, free speech, and innovation for people around the world.

Perhaps the single most exciting media hit for EFF in 2024 was “Secrets in Your Data,” the NOVA PBS documentary episode exploring “what happens to all the data we’re shedding and explores the latest efforts to maximize benefits – without compromising personal privacy.” EFFers Hayley Tsukayama, Eva Galperin, and Cory Doctorow were among those interviewed."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/12/eff-press-2024-review

#DigitalRights #USA #Privacy #DigitalActivism