Saturday, September 16, 2023

An outbreak of sanity? Not quite.

https://www.cpomagazine.com/data-privacy/privacy-advocates-celebrate-death-of-uk-online-safety-bill-clause-as-government-admits-encrypted-messaging-cant-be-scanned-without-breaking-it/

Privacy Advocates Celebrate Death of UK Online Safety Bill Clause as Government Admits Encrypted Messaging Can’t Be Scanned Without Breaking It

The most controversial portion of the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Bill appears to be dead in the water, as Ofcom has publicly admitted that the technology to create backdoors into encrypted messaging without breaking it does not exist and that the “spy clause” will not be enforced when the bill becomes law.

The Online Safety Bill remains otherwise intact, however, and the ministers involved with the issue appear to have not given up on the idea entirely. Minister Paul Scully said that companies will be directed to make their best efforts to develop technology to comply with the bill’s requirements for the monitoring and removal of child sexual abuse material from encrypted messaging platforms. The bill has not yet become law but is widely expected to before 2023 is out, with enforcement going into effect in mid-2024.





What would Clausewitz do?

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ai-and-the-next-generation-of-drone-warfare

A.I. and the Next Generation of Drone Warfare

On August 28th, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks, announced what she called the Replicator initiative—an all-hands-on-deck effort to modernize the American arsenal by adding fleets of artificially intelligent, unmanned, relatively cheap weapons and equipment. She described these machines as “attritable,” meaning that they can suffer attrition without compromising a mission. Imagine a swarm of hundreds or even thousands of unmanned aerial drones, communicating with each other as they collect intelligence on enemy-troop movements, and you will begin to understand the Deputy Secretary’s vision for Replicator. Even if a sizable number of the drones were shot down, the information they’d gathered would have already been recorded and sent back to human operators on the ground.





Useful thoughts?

https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2023/09/90834/

Artificial Mediocrity: The Hazard of AI in Education

AI-generated text provokes soaring hopes for limitless potential. Programs like Chat GPT and GrammarlyGO seem like wonderworkers. They “empower,” “assist,” and “inspire” their users. But after the first full semester of ChatGPT’s ubiquitous appearance in American classrooms, there is good reason to think that, far from helping students, chatbots imperil the very possibility of serious education. Chatbots replace disciplined learning with unthinking suggestibility and encourage students to avoid exercising practical judgment. Teachers must convey the hard reality that using a chatbot to skip the stages of an assignment that require organizing one’s own thoughts and research is not just dishonest, it is stultifying. It precludes excellence, and it encourages mediocrity.



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