Daily Archives: May 17, 2024

Top EU court says there is no right to online anonymity, because copyright is more important

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A year ago, Walled Culture wrote about an extremely important case that was being considered by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s top court. The central question was whether the judges considered that copyright was more important than privacy. The bad news is that the CJEU has just decided that it is:

The Court, sitting as the Full Court, holds that the general and indiscriminate retention of IP addresses does not necessarily constitute a serious interference with fundamental rights.

IP addresses refer to the identifying Internet number assigned to a user’s system when it is online. That may change each time someone uses the Internet, but if Internet Service Providers are required by law to retain information about who was assigned a particular address at a given time, then it is possible to carry out routine surveillance of people’s online activities. The CJEU has decided this is acceptable:

EU law does not preclude national legislation authorising the competent public authority, for the sole purpose of identifying the person suspected of having committed a criminal offence, to access the civil identity data associated with an IP address

The key problem is that copyright infringement by a private individual is regarded by the court as something so serious that it negates the right to privacy. It’s a sign of the twisted values that copyright has succeeded on imposing on many legal systems. It equates the mere copying of a digital file with serious crimes that merit a prison sentence, an evident absurdity.

As one of the groups that brought the original case, La Quadrature du Net, writes, this latest decision also has serious negative consequences for human rights in the EU:

Whereas in 2020, the CJEU considered that the retention of IP addresses constituted a serious interference with fundamental rights and that they could only be accessed, together with the civil identity of the Internet user, for the purpose of fighting serious crime or safeguarding national security, this is no longer true. The CJEU has reversed its reasoning: it now considers that the retention of IP addresses is, by default, no longer a serious interference with fundamental rights, and that it is only in certain cases that such access constitutes a serious interference that must be safeguarded with appropriate protection measures.

As a result, La Quadrature du Net says:

While in 2020 [the CJEU] stated that there was a right to online anonymity enshrined in the ePrivacy Directive, it is now abandoning it. Unfortunately, by giving the police broad access to the civil identity associated with an IP address and to the content of a communication, it puts a de facto end to online anonymity.

This is a good example of how copyright’s continuing obsession with ownership and control of digital material is warping the entire legal system in the EU. What was supposed to be simply a fair way of rewarding creators has resulted in a monstrous system of routine government surveillance carried out on hundreds of millions of innocent people just in case they copy a digital file.

Source: Top EU court says there is no right to online anonymity, because copyright is more important – Walled Culture

Device Decodes ‘Internal Speech’ in the Brain

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Scientists have developed brain implants that can decode internal speech — identifying words that two people spoke in their minds without moving their lips or making a sound.

Although the technology is at an early stage — it was shown to work with only a handful of words, and not phrases or sentences — it could have clinical applications in future.

Similar brain–computer interface (BCI) devices, which translate signals in the brain into text, have reached speeds of 62–78 words per minute for some people. But these technologies were trained to interpret speech that is at least partly vocalized or mimed.

The latest study — published in Nature Human Behaviour on 13 May — is the first to decode words spoken entirely internally, by recording signals from individual neurons in the brain in real time.

[…]

The researchers implanted arrays of tiny electrodes in the brains of two people with spinal-cord injuries. They placed the devices in the supramarginal gyrus (SMG), a region of the brain that had not been previously explored in speech-decoding BCIs.

Figuring out the best places in the brain to implant BCIs is one of the key challenges for decoding internal speech

[…]

wo weeks after the participants were implanted with microelectrode arrays in their left SMG, the researchers began collecting data. They trained the BCI on six words (battlefield, cowboy, python, spoon, swimming and telephone) and two meaningless pseudowords (nifzig and bindip). “The point here was to see if meaning was necessary for representation,” says Wandelt.

Over three days, the team asked each participant to imagine speaking the words shown on a screen and repeated this process several times for each word. The BCI then combined measurements of the participants’ brain activity with a computer model to predict their internal speech in real time.

For the first participant, the BCI captured distinct neural signals for all of the words and was able to identify them with 79% accuracy. But the decoding accuracy was only 23% for the second participant, who showed preferential representation for ‘spoon’ and ‘swimming’ and had fewer neurons that were uniquely active for each word. “It’s possible that different sub-areas in the supramarginal gyrus are more, or less, involved in the process,” says Wandelt.

Christian Herff, a computational neuroscientist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, thinks these results might highlight the different ways in which people process internal speech. “Previous studies showed that there are different abilities in performing the imagined task and also different BCI control abilities,” adds Marchesotti.

The authors also found that 82–85% of neurons that were active during internal speech were also active when the participants vocalized the words. But some neurons were active only during internal speech, or responded differently to specific words in the different tasks.

[…]

Source: Device Decodes ‘Internal Speech’ in the Brain | Scientific American

Gene therapy relieves back pain, repairs damaged disc in mice

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Disc-related back pain may one day meet its therapeutic match: gene therapy delivered by naturally derived nanocarriers that, a new study shows, repairs damaged discs in the spine and lowers pain symptoms in mice.

Scientists engineered nanocarriers using mouse connective-tissue cells called fibroblasts as a model of skin cells and loaded them with genetic material for a protein key to tissue development. The team injected a solution containing the carriers into damaged discs in mice at the same time the back injury occurred.

Assessing outcomes over 12 weeks, researchers found through imaging, tissue analysis, and mechanical and behavioral tests that the gene therapy restored structural integrity and function to degenerated discs and reduced signs of back pain in the animals.

[…]

“This can be used at the same time as surgery to actually boost healing of the disc itself,” said co-senior author Natalia Higuita-Castro, associate professor of biomedical engineering and neurological surgery at Ohio State. “Your own cells are actually doing the work and going back to a healthy state.”

The study was published online recently in the journal Biomaterials.

An estimated 40% of low-back pain cases are attributed to degeneration of the cushiony intervertebral discs that absorb shocks and provide flexibility to the spine, previous research suggests. And while trimming away bulging tissue from a herniated disc during surgery typically reduces pain, it does not repair the disc itself — which continues to degenerate with the passage of time.

[…]

This new study builds upon previous work in Higuita-Castro’s lab, which reported a year ago that nanocarriers called extracellular vesicles loaded with anti-inflammatory cargo curbed tissue injury in damaged mouse lungs. The engineered carriers are replicas of the natural extracellular vesicles that circulate in humans’ bloodstream and biological fluids, carrying messages between cells.

To create the vesicles, scientists apply an electrical charge to a donor cell to transiently open holes in its membrane, and deliver externally obtained DNA inside that converts to a specific protein, as well as molecules that prompt the manufacture of even more of a functional protein.

In this study, the cargo consisted of material to produce a “pioneer” transcription factor protein called FOXF1, which is important in the development and growth of tissues.

[…]

Compared to controls, the discs in mice receiving gene therapy showed a host of improvements: The tissue plumped back up and became more stable through production of a protein that holds water and other matrix proteins, all helping promote range of motion, load bearing and flexibility in the spine. Behavioral tests showed the therapy decreased symptoms of pain in mice, though these responses differed by sex — males and females showed varying levels of susceptibility to pain based on the types of movement being assessed.

The findings speak to the value of using universal adult donor cells to create these extracellular vesicle therapies, the researchers said, because they don’t carry the risk of generating an immune response. The gene therapy also, ideally, would function as a one-time treatment — a therapeutic gift that keeps on giving.

[…]

There are more experiments to come, testing the effects of other transcription factors that contribute to intervertebral disc development. And because this first study used young adult mice, the team also plans to test the therapy’s effects in older animals that model age-related degeneration and, eventually, in clinical trials for larger animals known to develop back problems.

[…]

Story Source:

Materials provided by Ohio State University. Original written by Emily Caldwell. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

  1. Shirley N. Tang, Ana I. Salazar-Puerta, Mary K. Heimann, Kyle Kuchynsky, María A. Rincon-Benavides, Mia Kordowski, Gilian Gunsch, Lucy Bodine, Khady Diop, Connor Gantt, Safdar Khan, Anna Bratasz, Olga Kokiko-Cochran, Julie Fitzgerald, Damien M. Laudier, Judith A. Hoyland, Benjamin A. Walter, Natalia Higuita-Castro, Devina Purmessur. Engineered extracellular vesicle-based gene therapy for the treatment of discogenic back pain. Biomaterials, 2024; 308: 122562 DOI: 10.1016/j.biomaterials.2024.122562

Source: Gene therapy relieves back pain, repairs damaged disc in mice | ScienceDaily

Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures

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Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.
In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn’t alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.
Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.
The discovery of nearly 900 fraudulent papers in 2022 at IOP Publishing, a physical sciences publisher, was a turning point for the nonprofit. “That really crystallized for us, everybody internally, everybody involved with the business,” said Kim Eggleton, head of peer review and research integrity at the publisher. “This is a real threat.”

Wiley will announce that it is closing 19 journals. Photo: Wiley

The sources of the fake science are “paper mills”—businesses or individuals that, for a price, will list a scientist as an author of a wholly or partially fabricated paper. The mill then submits the work, generally avoiding the most prestigious journals in favor of publications such as one-off special editions that might not undergo as thorough a review and where they have a better chance of getting bogus work published.
World-over, scientists are under pressure to publish in peer-reviewed journals—sometimes to win grants, other times as conditions for promotions. Researchers say this motivates people to cheat the system. Many journals charge a fee to authors to publish in them.
Problematic papers typically appear in batches of up to hundreds or even thousands within a publisher or journal. A signature move is to submit the same paper to multiple journals at once to maximize the chance of getting in, according to an industry trade group now monitoring the problem. Publishers say some fraudsters have even posed as academics to secure spots as guest editors for special issues and organizers of conferences, and then control the papers that are published there.
“The paper mill will find the weakest link and then exploit it mercilessly until someone notices,” said Nick Wise, an engineer who has documented paper-mill advertisements on social media and posts examples regularly on X under the handle @author_for_sale.
The journal Science flagged the practice of buying authorship in 2013. The website Retraction Watch and independent researchers have since tracked paper mills through their advertisements and websites. Researchers say they have found them in multiple countries including Russia, Iran, Latvia, China and India. The mills solicit clients on social channels such as Telegram or Facebook, where they advertise the titles of studies they intend to submit, their fee and sometimes the journal they aim to infiltrate. Wise said he has seen costs ranging from as little as $50 to as much as $8,500.
When publishers become alert to the work, mills change their tactics.
[…]
For Wiley, which publishes more than 2,000 journals, the problem came to light two years ago, shortly after it paid nearly $300 million for Hindawi, a company founded in Egypt in 1997 that included about 250 journals. In 2022, a little more than a year after the purchase, scientists online noticed peculiarities in dozens of studies from journals in the Hindawi family.
Scientific papers typically include citations that acknowledge work that informed the research, but the suspect papers included lists of irrelevant references. Multiple papers included technical-sounding passages inserted midway through, what Bishop called an “AI gobbledygook sandwich.” Nearly identical contact emails in one cluster of studies were all registered to a university in China where few if any of the authors were based. It appeared that all came from the same source.
[…]
The extent of the paper mill problem has been exposed by members of the scientific community who on their own have collected patterns in faked papers to recognize this fraud at scale and developed tools to help surface the work.
One of those tools, the “Problematic Paper Screener,” run by Guillaume Cabanac, a computer-science researcher who studies scholarly publishing at the Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier in France, scans the breadth of the published literature, some 130 million papers, looking for a range of red flags including “tortured phrases.”
Cabanac and his colleagues realized that researchers who wanted to avoid plagiarism detectors had swapped out key scientific terms for synonyms from automatic text generators, leading to comically misfit phrases. “Breast cancer” became “bosom peril”; “fluid dynamics” became “gooey stream”; “artificial intelligence” became “counterfeit consciousness.” The tool is publicly available.
Another data scientist, Adam Day, built “The Papermill Alarm,” a tool that uses large language models to spot signs of trouble in an article’s metadata, such as multiple suspect papers citing each other or using similar templates and simply altering minor experimental details. Publishers can pay to use the tool.
[…]
The incursion of paper mills has also forced competing publishers to collaborate. A tool launched through STM, the trade group of publishers, now checks whether new submissions were submitted to multiple journals at once, according to Joris van Rossum, product director who leads the “STM Integrity Hub,” launched in part to beat back paper mills. Last fall, STM added Day’s “The Papermill Alarm” to its suite of tools.
While publishers are fighting back with technology, paper mills are using the same kind of tools to stay ahead.
“Generative AI has just handed them a winning lottery ticket,” Eggleton of IOP Publishing said. “They can do it really cheap, at scale, and the detection methods are not where we need them to be. I can only see that challenge increasing.”

Source: Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures – WSJ