ReHacked vol. 346: ChatControl 2.0, OpenAI used song lyrics in violation of copyright laws and more
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"The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful." --Kurt Vonnegut
CHAT CONTROL 2.0 THROUGH THE BACK DOOR – Breyer warns: “The EU is playing us for fools – now they’re scanning our texts and banning teens!” – Patrick Breyer #privacy #chatcontrol
CHAT CONTROL 2.0 THROUGH THE BACK DOOR – Breyer warns: “The EU is playing us for fools – now they’re scanning our texts and banning teens!”
FREEDOM, DEMOCRACY AND TRANSPARENCY
Just before a decisive meeting in Brussels, digital rights expert and former Member of the European Parliament Dr. Patrick Breyer is sounding the alarm. Using a “deceptive sleight of hand,” a mandatory and expanded Chat Control is being pushed through the back door, in a form even more intrusive than the originally rejected plan. The legislative package could be greenlit tomorrow in a closed-door EU working group session.
“This is a political deception of the highest order,” warns Breyer. “Following loud public protests, several member states including Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Austria said ‘No’ to indiscriminate Chat Control. Now it’s coming back through the back door – disguised, more dangerous, and more comprehensive than ever. The public is being played for fools.”
According to Breyer, the new compromise proposal is a Trojan horse containing three poison pills for digital freedom:
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MANDATORY CHAT CONTROL – MASKED AS “RISK MITIGATION” Officially, explicit scanning obligations have been dropped. But a loophole in Article 4 of the new draft obliges providers of e-mail, chat and messenger services like WhatsApp to take “all appropriate risk mitigation measures.” This means they can still be forced to scan all private messages – including on end-to-end encrypted services. “The loophole renders the much-praised removal of detection orders worthless and negates their supposed voluntary nature,” says Breyer. “Even client-side scanning (CSS) on our smartphones could soon become mandatory – the end of secure encryption.”
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TOTAL SURVEILLANCE OF TEXT CHATS: A “DIGITAL WITCH HUNT” The supposedly voluntary “Chat Control” goes far beyond the previously discussed scanning of photos, videos, and links. Now, algorithms and AI can be used to mass-scan the private chat texts and metadata of all citizens for suspicious keywords and signals. “No AI can reliably distinguish between a flirt, sarcasm, and criminal ‘grooming’,” explains Breyer. “Imagine your phone scanning every conversation with your partner, your daughter, your therapist and leaking it just because the word ‘love’ or ‘meet’ appears somewhere. This is not child protection – this is a digital witch hunt. The result will be a flood of false positives, placing innocent citizens under general suspicion and exposing masses of private, even intimate, chats and photos to strangers.” Under the current voluntary “Chat Control 1.0” scanning scheme, German federal police (BKA) already warn that around 50% of all reports are criminally irrelevant, equating to tens of thousands of leaked legal chats per year.
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DIGITAL HOUSE ARREST FOR TEENS & THE END OF ANONYMOUS COMMUNICATION In the shadow of the Chat Control debate, two other disastrous measures are being pushed through:
The End of Anonymous Communication: To reliably identify minors as required by the text, every citizen would have to present their ID or have their face scanned to open an email or messenger account. “This is the de facto end of anonymous communication online – a disaster for whistleblowers, journalists, political activists, and people seeking help who rely on the protection of anonymity,” warns Breyer. “Digital House Arrest”: Teens under 16 face a blanket ban from WhatsApp, Instagram, online games, and countless other apps with chat functions, allegedly to protect them from grooming. “Digital isolation instead of education, protection by exclusion instead of empowerment – this is paternalistic, out of touch with reality, and pedagogical nonsense.”
URGENT APPEAL: GOVERNMENTS MUST NOW USE THEIR VETO!
Several EU governments—including those of Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Czechia, Luxembourg, Finland, Austria, and Estonia—have previously voiced strong opposition to indiscriminate mass scanning. “Now, these governments must show some backbone!” demands Breyer. “Block this sham compromise in the Council and demand immediate corrections to save the fundamental rights of all citizens. The EU Parliament has already shown, across party lines, how child protection and digital freedom can be achieved together.”
Breyer suggests the following immediate corrections before any government should agree:
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No mandatory chat control through the back door: Clarify that scans cannot be enforced as “risk mitigation.” No AI chat police: Restrict scanning to known child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
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No mass surveillance: Only allow targeted surveillance of suspects based on a court order.
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Preserve the right to anonymity: The mandatory age verification requirements must be scrapped.
“They are selling us security but delivering a total surveillance machine,” Breyer concludes. “They promise child protection but punish our children and criminalize privacy. This is not a compromise – this is a fraud against the citizen. And no democratic government should make itself an accomplice.”
OpenAI used song lyrics in violation of copyright laws, German court says | Reuters #copyrights
OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT violated German copyright laws by reproducing lyrics from songs by best-selling musician Herbert Groenemeyer and others, a court ruled on Tuesday, in a closely watched case against the U.S. firm over its use of lyrics to train its language models.
The regional court in Munich found that the company trained its AI on protected content from nine German songs, including Groenemeyer's hits "Maenner" and "Bochum".
The Reuters Daily Briefing newsletter provides all the news you need to start your day. Sign up here. The case was brought by German music rights society GEMA, whose members include composers, lyricists and publishers, in another sign of artists around the world fighting back against data scraping by AI.
Presiding judge Elke Schwager ordered OpenAI to pay damages for the use of copyrighted material, without disclosing a figure.
GEMA legal advisor Kai Welp said GEMA hoped discussions could now take place with OpenAI on how copyright holders can be remunerated.
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Patronato: My mum was a 17-year-old free spirit in Franco's Spain - so she was locked up and put in a coma #history #longread
Marina Freixa always knew there was something dark and unspoken about her family.
Her mother had grown up under Spain's decades-long dictatorship, which ended in 1975, but the details of her childhood were hazy.
Then everything changed one Christmas a decade ago - when Marina was about 20.
That winter's evening around the table, with a cloud of cigarette smoke suspended in the air and wine glasses drained, Marina's mother, Mariona Roca Tort, began to speak.
Several years ago, Mariona revealed the truth about her adolescence to Marina and her cousins. "My parents reported me to the authorities," Mariona told them. "They put me in a reformatory when I was 17."
Reformatories were institutions where girls and young women who refused to conform to the Franco regime's Catholic values were detained - single mothers, girls with boyfriends, lesbians. Girls who'd been sexually assaulted were incarcerated, assuming the blame for their own abuse. Orphans and abandoned girls might also find themselves living behind convent walls.
Coinbase Data Breach Timeline Doesn't Add Up: I Have Recordings & Emails Proving Attacks Started Months Before Their 'Discovery' - Jonathan Clark #security #blockchain #longread
Why are most people right-handed? | Popular Science #nature #history
“When facing an opponent, a right-hander is most likely to stab an opponent’s left thorax, where the majority of the heart is,” Rodway explains. So, say during a medieval duel, “a right-hander may be more likely to kill an opponent than a left-hander, because they penetrate the heart. This can result in a relative survival advantage for right-handers, and this may be one of the forces that led to the prevalence of right-handed humans.”
Things that aren't doing the thing, and one that is #lifehacks
Story about WebSocket for a 5 yrears old #book #software #fun #offrehacked
Pinouts.org #hardware
The Pinouts Book is a free digital book created for designers and engineers as a quick reference for remembering the different pinout functions in your electronics projects.
The book covers 200 commonly used components, such as connectors, single board computers, dev boards, memory cards, microcontroller chips, and more.
30 Intimate Photobooth Portraits of Couples From the Mid-20th Century ~ Vintage Everyday #photography #history
During the mid-20th century (roughly 1940s–1960s), the coin-operated photobooth became a cultural phenomenon, offering couples a unique and spontaneous way to document their relationships. Found in train stations, amusement parks, and drugstores, these small, curtained spaces offered a fleeting moment of privacy and intimacy away from the gaze of society, which was particularly significant for expressing affection.
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