Daily Archives: June 14, 2020

Polish President Says LGBT ‘Ideology’ Worse Than Communism

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Polish President Andrzej Duda accused the LGBT rights movement Saturday of promoting a viewpoint more harmful than communism and said he agreed with another conservative politician who stated that “LGBT is not people, it’s an ideology.”

Duda made his comments in the small southwestern town of Brzeg as he campaigns for reelection in Poland, a predominantly Catholic nation that spent more than four decades under communist governments.

Gay rights is emerging as a key campaign theme in the presidential election as the race grows close between Duda, backed by the nationalist conservative ruling party, and Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, who has called for tolerance for gays and lesbians.

Duda, who is 48, told his supporters that his parents’ generation did not struggle to cast off communism only to now accept “an ideology” that he thinks “is even more destructive to the human being.”

The president said that during Poland’s communist era, regimes ensured survival by indoctrinating the youngest generation.

“That was Bolshevism. It was the ideologizing of children,” he said. “Today, there are also attempts to push an ideology on us and our children, but different. It’s totally new, but it is also neo-Bolshevism.”

Earlier in the week, Duda signed a declaration drafted for the stated purpose of helping families that included language on “protecting children from LGBT ideology” with a ban on “propagating LGBT ideology in public institutions.”

Many conservative politicians in Poland say they are not against gay men and lesbians as individuals, but insist they oppose the goals of a civil rights movement they claim is imported from abroad and threatens to sexualize young people.

But gay and lesbian Poles and liberal Poles say government officials are adopting a language of dehumanization. They believe Duda and others are targeting homosexuals to curry favor with the powerful Catholic church — which faces allegations of covering up clerical abuse — and shore up support among conservative voters ahead of the election.

Some analysts also suspect that Duda and the governing Law and Justice party are making a bid for far-right voters who will mostly support the candidate of a smaller party, Confederation, in the election’s first round but whose votes will be up for grabs in a runoff.

Source: Polish President Says LGBT ‘Ideology’ Worse Than Communism | Time

Trillions of Words Analyzed, OpenAI Sets Loose AI Language Colossus – The API

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Over the past few months, OpenAI has vacuumed an incredible amount of data into its artificial intelligence language systems. It sucked up Wikipedia, a huge swath of the rest of the internet and tons of books. This mass of text – trillions of words – was then analyzed and manipulated by a supercomputer to create what the research group bills as a major AI breakthrough and the heart of its first commercial product, which came out on Thursday.

The product name — OpenAI calls it “the API” — might not be magical, but the things it can accomplish do seem to border on wizardry at times. The software can perform a broad set of language tasks, including translating between languages, writing news stories and poems and answering everyday questions. Ask it, for example, if you should keep reading a story, and you might be told, “Definitely. The twists and turns keep coming.”

OpenAI wants to build the most flexible, general purpose AI language system of all time. Typically, companies and researchers will tune their AI systems to handle one, limited task. The API, by contrast, can crank away at a broad set of jobs and, in many cases, at levels comparable with specialized systems. While the product is in a limited test phase right now, it will be released broadly as something that other companies can use at the heart of their own offerings such as customer support chat systems, education products or games, OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said.

[…]

Software developers can begin training the AI system just by showing it a few examples of what they want the code to do. If you ask it a number of questions in a row, for example, the system starts to sense it’s in question-and-answer mode and tweaks its responses accordingly. There are also tools that let you alter how literal or creative you want the AI to be.

But even a layperson – i.e. this reporter – can use the product. You can simply type text into a box, hit a button and get responses. Drop a couple paragraphs of a news story into the API, and it will try to complete the piece with results that vary from I-kinda-fear-for-my-job good to this-computer-might-be-on-drugs bad.

Source: Trillions of Words Analyzed, OpenAI Sets Loose AI Language Colossus – Bloomberg

Amazon Set to Face Antitrust Charges in European Union

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European Union officials are preparing to bring antitrust charges against Amazon for abusing its dominance in internet commerce to box out smaller rivals, according to people with knowledge of the case.

Nearly two years in the making, the case is one of the most aggressive attempts by a government to crimp the power of the e-commerce giant, which has largely sidestepped regulation throughout its 26-year history.

The European Union regulators, who already have a reputation as the world’s most aggressive watchdogs of the technology industry, have determined that Amazon is stifling competition by unfairly using data collected from third-party merchants to boost its own product offerings, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deliberations were private.

The case against Amazon is part of a broader attempt in the United States and Europe to probe the business practices of the world’s largest technology companies, as authorities on both sides of the Atlantic see what they believe is a worrying concentration of power in the digital economy.

Margarethe Vestager, the European Commissioner who leads antitrust enforcement and digital policy, is also examining practices by Apple and Facebook. In Washington, the Justice Department, Federal Trade Commission and Congress are targeting Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.

William Kovacic, a law professor at George Washington University, said the tech industry was facing a “striking critical mass” of attention from governments around the world, including Australia, Brazil and India. He said that regulators in Brussels and Washington may deploy so-called interim measures against the companies, a rarely used tool that could force Amazon and other large tech platforms to halt certain practices while a case is litigated.

[…]

The case stems from Amazon’s treatment of third-party merchants who rely on its website to reach customers. Investigators have focused on Amazon’s dual role as both the owner of its online store and a seller of goods that compete with other sellers, creating a conflict of interest.

Authorities in Europe have concluded that Amazon abuses its position to give its own products preferential treatment. European officials have spent the past year interviewing merchants and others who depend on Amazon to better understand how it collects data to use to its advantage, including agreements that require them to share certain data with Amazon as a condition of selling goods on the platform.

Many merchants have complained that if they have a product that is selling well on Amazon, the company will then introduce its own product at a lower price, or give it more prominent placement on the website.

Source: Amazon Set to Face Antitrust Charges in European Union – The New York Times

So yeah, I had a talk about that in 2019

Internet Archive Ends Free Ebook Program Early due to money grubbing copyright enforcers suing them for being a library

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Back in March, the Internet Archive launched its National Emergency Library, a program that made roughly 1.4 million books available to the public without the usual waitlists. But on Wednesday, the organization announced it was ending the program two weeks early after four major publishers decided to sue Internet Archive for copyright infringement.

Internet Archive explained in a blog post that after June 16, it would revert to a controlled digital lending model, in which libraries lend patrons digitized copies of a physical book one at a time. “We moved up our schedule because, last Monday, four commercial publishers chose to sue Internet Archive during a global pandemic,” the non-profit said. “However, this lawsuit is not just about the temporary National Emergency Library. The complaint attacks the concept of any library owning and lending digital books, challenging the very idea of what a library is in the digital world.”

By eliminating waitlists, the National Emergency Library program effectively upended how publishers have thus far controlled how libraries distribute ebooks. Under the usual system, publishers sell two-year licenses that cost several times more than what you’d pay if you just bought the book outright. Internet Archive’s program basically made it so any number of people could temporarily download a single ebook an infinite number of times between March 24 and June 30, the original end date for the program.

In their complaint, Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and John Wiley & Sons allege that in addition to violating copyrights, Internet Archive’s free ebook program “grossly exceed legitimate library services” and “constitute willful digital piracy on an industrial scale.”

Before blasting Internet Archive for capitulating, this lawsuit has the ability to tank the organization—probably best known for its Wayback Machine web archiving tool—for good. Publishers could claim up to $150,000 in damages per title. When you multiply that by the 1.4 million works Internet Archive put up for free, the final number could be astronomical, and well beyond the nonprofit’s ability to pay. A win for publishers would put Internet Archive’s other projects at risk.

It appears that publishers aren’t just after Internet Archive’s temporary free ebook initiative. The complaint also contends that controlled digital lending is an “invented theory” and that its rules “have been concocted from whole cloth and continue to get worse.” It also contends that Internet Archive’s “one-to-one conflation of print and ebooks is fundamentally flawed.” Controlled digital lending, however, isn’t unique to Internet Archive. It’s a framework that’s been supported by several libraries over the years, including many university libraries like UC Berkeley Library. Publishers winning this lawsuit may potentially also put the kibosh on the entire controlled digital lending model.

It’s clear that Internet Archive’s decision was intended to appease publishers into dropping the suit. According to Internet Archive, some academic publishers who were initially displeased with the National Emergency Library eventually came around. That said, it’s unclear whether commercial publishers would do the same, as they have everything to gain by strengthening their hold over ebook copyrights.

Source: Internet Archive Ends Free Ebook Program Early

Spies Can Eavesdrop by Watching a Light Bulb’s Vibrations

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The list of sophisticated eavesdropping techniques has grown steadily over years: wiretaps, hacked phones, bugs in the wall—even bouncing lasers off of a building’s glass to pick up conversations inside. Now add another tool for audio spies: Any light bulb in a room that might be visible from a window.

Researchers from Israeli’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Weizmann Institute of Science today revealed a new technique for long-distance eavesdropping they call “lamphone.” They say it allows anyone with a laptop and less than a thousand dollars of equipment—just a telescope and a $400 electro-optical sensor—to listen in on any sounds in a room that’s hundreds of feet away in real-time, simply by observing the minuscule vibrations those sounds create on the glass surface of a light bulb inside. By measuring the tiny changes in light output from the bulb that those vibrations cause, the researchers show that a spy can pick up sound clearly enough to discern the contents of conversations or even recognize a piece of music.

“Any sound in the room can be recovered from the room with no requirement to hack anything and no device in the room,” says Ben Nassi, a security researcher at Ben-Gurion who developed the technique with fellow researchers Yaron Pirutin and Boris Zadov, and who plans to present their findings at the Black Hat security conference in August. “You just need line of sight to a hanging bulb, and this is it.”

In their experiments, the researchers placed a series of telescopes around 80 feet away from a target office’s light bulb, and put each telescope’s eyepiece in front of a Thorlabs PDA100A2 electro-optical sensor. They then used an analog-to-digital converter to convert the electrical signals from that sensor to digital information. While they played music and speech recordings in the faraway room, they fed the information picked up by their set-up to a laptop, which analyzed the readings.

side by side images of telescope pointing to window and aerial of bridge
The researchers’ experimental setup, with an electro-optical sensor behind the eyepiece of a telescope, pointing at a lightbulb inside an office building more than 80 feet away.Courtesy of Ben Nassi

The researchers found that the tiny vibrations of the light bulb in response to sound—movements that they measured at as little as a few hundred microns—registered as a measurable changes in the light their sensor picked up through each telescope. After processing the signal through software to filter out noise, they were able to reconstruct recordings of the sounds inside the room with remarkable fidelity: They showed, for instance, that they could reproduce an audible snippet of a speech from President Donald Trump well enough for it to be transcribed by Google’s Cloud Speech API. They also generated a recording of the Beatles’ “Let It Be” clear enough that the name-that-tune app Shazam could instantly recognize it.

The technique nonetheless has some limitations. In their tests, the researchers used a hanging bulb, and it’s not clear if a bulb mounted in a fixed lamp or a ceiling fixture would vibrate enough to derive the same sort of audio signal. The voice and music recordings they used in their demonstrations were also louder than the average human conversation, with speakers turned to their maximum volume. But the team points out that they also used a relatively cheap electro-optical sensor and analog-to-digital converter, and could have upgraded to a more expensive one to pick up quieter conversations. LED bulbs also offer a signal-to-noise ratio that’s about 6.3 times that of an incandescent bulb and 70 times a fluorescent one.

Source: Spies Can Eavesdrop by Watching a Light Bulb’s Vibrations  | WIRED

Someone got so fed up with GE fridge DRM – yes, fridge DRM – they made a whole website on how to bypass it

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Fed up with the DRM in a General Electric refrigerator that pushed the owner to buy expensive manufacturer-approved replacement water filters, an anonymous hacker went to the trouble of buying a domain name and setting up a website at gefiltergate.com to pen a screed about appliance digital rights restriction management (DRM) and how to bypass it.

The fridge in question required a GE RPWFE refrigerator water filter. It has an RFID chip, which the fridge uses to verify the authenticity of the part. The RPWFE filter costs much more than unapproved filters: about $50 compared to $13.

“Some ******* at GE thought it would be a good idea to include a ******* RFID DRM module in select refrigerators,” the unidentified individual wrote, without using the asterisks we’ve included because online profanity filters are awful.

The Register contacted GE to ask about this, and the American giant’s corporate communications director promptly replied that GE sold its appliance unit to China-based Haier in 2016, which continues to use its brand. Haier did not immediately respond to our inquiry.

The gefiltergate.com website, borrowing from a similar post on another website back in May, explains how to hack your Haier GE-brand fridge by affixing an RFID tag – stripped from a component for bypassing the water filter system – to the RFID sensor.

The GE website suggests that a water filter is a good idea to avoid exposure to unfiltered water and sediment, inadvertently offering a sad commentary on public water infrastructure and government funding priorities. It recommends its RFID water filter because the chip chats with the fridge to report leaks, and will shut off the water supply if a leak is detected.

But the appliance doesn’t require the RFID filter; fridge owners can use the bypass plug, and still get unfiltered water.

“Non-GE filters and counterfeit filters without this technology will not perform the same way in the event of a water leak,” the company’s website explains. “The refrigerator has the option to use a bypass plug should you not want to use a genuine GE Appliances water filter.”

That makes it sound as if fridge owners can use water filters from another vendor but that’s not the case – the bypass plug is just to silence the fridge display screen warnings coming from the filtration system’s RFID sensor. “The ID chip on the filter detects when a wrong or non-genuine GE Appliance part is used,” the GE Appliances website states. “If this happens, the dispenser will not work and the display may read ‘Leak Detected.'”

Hence the need to hack the fridge, which is something product owners evidently have been doing for years. The Amazon.com webpage for the bypass plug contains a string of user reviews indicating that customers only purchased the thing for its RFID chip. And complaints abound on discussion site Reddit.

In a phone interview with The Register, Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of The Repair Association, said product hacking of this sort is entirely legal, in America at least. The US Copyright Office, she said, included software-enabled appliance repair in its 2018 rulemaking [PDF], and patents are not an issue in this case. And the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act guarantees that consumers can use parts not from the original manufacturer.

Asked whether such practices generate enough ill-will to make them unprofitable, Gordon-Byrne said they can, pointing to Keurig’s problems selling coffee makers with digital locks, but added that people have to be aware of the problem.

“It generates some ill will but not enough to offset the value of controlling the whole parts market,” she said. “But it’s a stupid, stupid thing to do. There’s no reason to do this.”

Right-to-repair legislation, which aims to ensure consumers have a legal right to repair products where product makers or laws deny that possibility, was being considered in about 20 US states last year. However, Gordon-Byrne said that progress has stalled due to the coronavirus outbreak. She expects repair bills will have to be reintroduced in January next year.

Current US Copyright Office exemptions, she said, should be renewed for 2021 and she expects to lobby for new exemptions for product categories where repairs that require breaking digital locks are still not allowed, like boats, medical equipment, and game consoles.

Source: Someone got so fed up with GE fridge DRM – yes, fridge DRM – they made a whole website on how to bypass it • The Register

Trump Administration Eliminates Transgender Health Protections

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In an utterly heartless move, the Trump administration on Friday eliminated health care protections for transgender people during an ongoing global pandemic that has claimed more lives in the U.S. than in any other country.

It did this by finalizing a rule under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which prohibits health programs or activities from discriminating on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability. The Trump administration rule—announced on the fourth anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting and in the middle of Pride month—changes the definition of sex discrimination, eliminating protections due to gender identity, and considers the word “sex” to refer to “male or female and as determined by biology.”

[…]

The nondiscrimination provisions were established by the Obama administration in 2016. That year, the Obama administration issued a rule to implement Section 1557 that redefined sex discrimination to include gender identity, which it defined as, “an individual’s internal sense of gender, which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female, and which may be different from an individual’s sex assigned at birth.”

Under the new rule, a transgender person could be refused care for a checkup at a doctor’s office, according to NPR. Other possible scenarios include a transgender man being denied treatment for ovarian cancer, or a hysterectomy not being covered by an insurer. Some experts say that the rule opens the door for medical providers to refuse to test someone for covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, simply because they’re transgender.

When it comes to health insurance and health care, transgender people are vulnerable to being treated negatively by their insurance and health care providers. According to the (old broken link: 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey) 2015 US Transgender Survey (new link) carried out by the National Center for Transgender Equality, transgender people have been denied coverage for care related to their gender transition, for routine care because they were transgender, or for transition-related surgery.

The survey found that 23 percent of respondents reported not going to see a doctor when they needed to because of fear of being mistreated as a transgender person. Of those who did go see a healthcare provider, 33 percent reported that they had had at least one negative experience related to being transgender, such as being refused treatment, verbally harassed, or physically or sexually assaulted, among other horrible experiences.

Source: Trump Administration Eliminates Transgender Health Protections

So Trump is following in the illustrious footsteps of Hungary, whos president immediately used the emergency dictatorial powers bestowed upon him due to Covid to changes the “sex” category in official documents like birth certificates to “sex at birth,” which can never be changed.

Source: Hungary bans legal recognition of its transgender citizens