Tech News

Given that fully jabbed people can pass on covid then it seems ineffectual for countries to insist on vaccine passports for venues.

Perhaps the point is rather to ensure that most customers are carrying their phones so enabling secret state snooping.

Rights groups in Israel have called on the country's top court to repeal the recently announced measures to use the counter-terrorism phone (presumably GPS) tracking system to track carriers of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.

On Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced emergency measures including phone tracking to locate those infected by the Omicron variant. The Shin Bet counter-terrorism agency's phone-tracking technology was to be used to enable to surveillance.

The phone tracking system can match the carriers of the virus locations to other phones nearby to identify people that might have been exposed.

The UK government has announced that it is funding five projects to snoop on your device content supposedly in a quest to seek out child porn. But surely these technologies will have wider usage.

The five projects are the winners of the Safety Tech Challenge Fund, which aims to encourage the tech industry to find practical solutions to combat child sexual exploitation and abuse online, without impacting people's rights to privacy and data protection in their communications.

The winners will each receive an initial £85,000 from the Fund, which is administered by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Home Office, to help them bring their technical proposals for new digital tools and applications to combat online child abuse to the market.

Based across the UK and Europe, and in partnership with leading UK universities, the winners of the Safety Tech Challenge Fund are:

• Edinburgh-based Cyan Forensics and Crisp Thinking, in partnership with the University of Edinburgh and Internet Watch Foundation, will develop a plug-in to be integrated within encrypted social platforms. It will detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM) - by matching content against known illegal material.
• SafeToNet and Anglia Ruskin University will develop a suite of live video-moderation AI technologies that can run on any smart device to prevent the filming of nudity, violence, pornography and CSAM in real-time, as it is being produced.
• GalaxKey, based in St Albans, will work with Poole-based Image Analyser and Yoti, an age-assurance company, to develop software focusing on user privacy, detection and prevention of CSAM and predatory behavior, and age verification to detect child sexual abuse before it reaches an E2EE environment, preventing it from being uploaded and shared.
• DragonflAI, based in Edinburgh, will also work with Yoti to combine their on-device nudity AI detection technology with age assurance technologies to spot new indecent images within E2EE environments.
• T3K-Forensics are based in Austria and will work to implement their AI-based child sexual abuse detection technology on smartphones to detect newly created material, providing a toolkit that social platforms can integrate with their E2EE services.

The UK Ministry of defence has published a wide ranging paper about better ways for it to catalogue and analyse data from multiple sources, mostly for military purposes.

The document contains a brief section speaking of a capability to monitor social media with a view to analysing changes in political sentiment:

The below present example scenarios for Defence to drive battlespace advantage and business efficiency through exploiting its data in a multi-domain and integrated environment.

Political demonstration:

• Sensors: Automated scanning of social media platforms (analysing key words and interactions) detects change in population sentiment.

• Decision makers: Local authorities are quickly informed of change in sentiment. Decision making is enhanced by local surveillance of groups of interest.

• Effectors: Escalated monitoring and intelligence gathering, with heightened readiness measures to respond in place.

Surely an incredibly short paragraph to describe such an enormous capability for state snooping.

A group of influential technology and media companies has partnered to form the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a Joint Development Foundation project established to address the supposed prevalence of disinformation, misinformation and online content fraud through developing technical standards for certifying the source and history or provenance of media content.

Founding members Adobe, Arm, BBC, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic seek to establish a standardized provenance solution with the goal of combating misleading content. C2PA member organizations will work together to develop content provenance specifications for common asset types and formats to enable publishers, creators and consumers to trace the origin and evolution of a piece of media, including images, videos, audio and documents. These technical specifications will include defining what information is associated with each type of asset, how that information is presented and stored, and how evidence of tampering can be identified.

The C2PA's open standard will give platforms a method to preserve and read provenance-based digital content. Because an open standard can be adopted by any online platform, it is critical to scaling trust across the internet. In addition to the inclusion of varied media types at scale, C2PA is driving an end-to-end provenance experience from the capturing device to the information consumer. Collaboration with chipmakers, news organizations, and software and platform companies is critical to facilitate a comprehensive provenance standard and drive broad adoption across the content ecosystem.

The US company Toki is building 'school-in-a-box' devices to connect up to 1 billion people across Africa and Asia, using technologies that it claims could bypass local censorship. The devices will be Wi-Fi-ready servers that can handle dozens of concurrent users.

One of Toki's country managers describes on LinkedIn that the devices would also run a decentralized search engine, designed to be anonymous, private and censorship-resistant. They will be donated to communities in the developing world by U.S.-based eRise, which was founded in 2019 to, according to its website, focus on digital empowerment initiatives that are capital-efficient, and which improve access to content, community and commerce.

Both Toki and eRise were founded by entrepreneur and free speech advocate Rob Monster. Monster owns domain registration company Epik, which allowed controversial social network Parler to come briefly back online last week after the site was booted from Amazon's cloud service. Parler is just one of several platforms enabled by Epik, and Monster's other domain and web hosting companies, that have been home to right leaning forums that western states and social media companies censor and ban.

Presumably technology that was designed to help developing countries with their censorship problems could now be repurposed to helping western countries with their censorship problems.