It’s been a hell of a ride following @briankrebs break this story revolving around a company that posed as a #DataMonitoring service when it was actually a #DataMining company, involving major companies in U.S. #Tech#InfoSec
The terrible human toll in Gaza has many causes.
A chilling investigation by +972 highlights efficiency:
An engineer: “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed.”
An AI outputs "100 targets a day". Like a factory with murder delivery:
"According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”"
"The third is “power targets,” which includes high-rises and residential towers in the heart of cities, and public buildings such as universities, banks, and government offices."
“Levy describes a system that has almost reached perfection. The political echelon wants to maintain the status quo, and the military provides it with legitimacy in exchange for funds and status.”
“Levy points out the gradual withdrawal of the old Ashkenazi middle class from the ranks of the combat forces[…]:
• the military’s complete reliance on technology as a decisive factor in warfare;
• the adoption of the concept […] of an army that is “small and lethal”;
• the obsession with the idea of #deterrence, which is supposed to negate the other side’s will to fight; and
• the complete addiction to the status quo as the only possible and desirable state of affairs.”
Here is a follow-up of
Yuval Abraham's investigation:
"The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties" https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
" - but if data harvesting was banned it would end the internet as we know it!"
This is almost always the response from the exact same demographic of The Power of The Market™️ adherents who should know that if we abolished the data-mining giants of the digital world today, tomorrow a thousand new businesses would be ready to flood the market & avail themselves of the opportunities now open, under whatever new circumstances now available...
So, as I understand it, and correct me if I'm wrong, the core of #Mastodon's timeline is the #protocol that hands off everybody's posts on one instance, to all the other instances.
#Threads is an instance on the protocol that Masto uses to share posts across the world.
As I also understand it, while an instance may block incoming posts, that doesn't stop outgoing posts going to that instance, nor between people where one has migrated to the blocked instance.
Ergo: Threads is doing what I came to masto from #facebook to stop participating in - the largest #datamining and user manipulation experiment in the history of advertising.
Yes, Masto itself is cool, but like any tool, it can, and is, being used for evil. In the case of threads, it's the "hoovering up", analysing and using all of our data to manipulate people. Maybe not manipulating us, here, but certainly manipulating people on any timeline that Meta owns, and any customers of their advertising clients. And our data gives them more reaction measures, a superthread of human reactions and the goads that alter people's choices subconciously.
I'd argue that Threads isn't just data mining, it's stealing our reaction history. I destroyed my facebook account when I left. I withdrew my consent to be data mined. Now, even this post, where I again restate my position that I do not consent to my data being used as human reaction analytics, they are likely using threads to pilfer the data of even people who are not consenting to them pilfering it. That means I am seriously considering leaving the fediverse.
Actors #naming in EU laws:
"The end user and recipient of the service are both natural and legal persons using a certain service. However, the #DSA recipient of the service can be a person acting in a personal or commercial/professional capacity whereas the #DMA end user can only be a person acting in a personal capacity."