EU Commission tried to influence political views in the Netherlands. In the contentious fight over the heavily criticized chat control regulation (a proposed EU law that could undermine all encrypted online communication to allow authorities to read online chats), the European Commission has identified the Netherlands as a Member State that they wanted to influence politically. In an attempt to "flip" the views in the Netherlands, the Commission went to X/Twitter and made postings indirectly promoting this Regulation.

Hi,

For reasons too absurd to explain, this Wednesday I'm invited to a virtual "coffee break" with the speaker of one of Spain's cryptoexchanges, https://bit2me.com/. The event is organized by Cinco Días, one of the main economic newspapers in the country.

I'm looking for a list of potential questions I might ask if I have the chance. I already have the basics ("how's this different to a tulip", "what super-legitimate uses, apart from paying for drugs, hitmen, sex trafficking, launder money, evade taxes and inflate bubbles", "what about the electricity usage", etc), and given that BBVA (Spain's second largest bank) and Telefonica (Spain's main telco) are investing money, I also want to ask how they're handling the child porn they have in their servers.

If anyone has more suggestions, I'm all ears.

I guess self-driving cars are not killing people fast enough and they're diversifying.

What the URL above says. It's getting crazy on Xitter.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/12406642

Body of the toot:

Absolutely unbelievable but here we are. #Slack by default using messages, files etc for building and training #LLM models, enabled by default and opting out requires a manual email from the workspace owner.

https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/trust/data-management/privacy-principles

What a time to be alive in IT. 🤦‍♂️

Body of the toot:

Absolutely unbelievable but here we are. #Slack by default using messages, files etc for building and training #LLM models, enabled by default and opting out requires a manual email from the workspace owner.

https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/trust/data-management/privacy-principles

What a time to be alive in IT. 🤦‍♂️

Google responded to Ed, Ed responds.

I've suggested the orange site changes the title to "In response to Google?" to keep up with latest practices around there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40164393

The US has urged Ukraine to halt attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure, warning that the drone strikes risk driving up global oil prices and provoking retaliation, according to three people familiar with the discussions. [...]

One person said that the White House had grown increasingly frustrated by brazen Ukrainian drone attacks that have struck oil refineries, terminals, depots and storage facilities across western Russia, hurting its oil production capacity.

Russia remains one of the world’s most important energy exporters despite western sanctions on its oil and gas sector. Oil prices have risen about 15 per cent this year, to $85 a barrel, pushing up fuel costs just as US President Joe Biden begins his campaign for re-election.

Un-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/wv1Y3

A thread compiling all Verge articles about AI influence on the upcoming election.

Has its own RSS feed: https://www.theverge.com/rss/stream/23862839

AKA "surprisingly, oligopolies are there to make money and care about their customers just enough not to pee on their faces while someone else is looking".

Kenn Dahl says he has always been a careful driver. The owner of a software company near Seattle, he drives a leased Chevrolet Bolt. He’s never been responsible for an accident.

So Mr. Dahl, 65, was surprised in 2022 when the cost of his car insurance jumped by 21 percent. Quotes from other insurance companies were also high. One insurance agent told him his LexisNexis report was a factor.

LexisNexis is a New York-based global data broker with a “Risk Solutions” division that caters to the auto insurance industry and has traditionally kept tabs on car accidents and tickets. Upon Mr. Dahl’s request, LexisNexis sent him a 258-page “consumer disclosure report,” which it must provide per the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

What it contained stunned him: more than 130 pages detailing each time he or his wife had driven the Bolt over the previous six months. It included the dates of 640 trips, their start and end times, the distance driven and an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only thing it didn’t have is where they had driven the car.

On a Thursday morning in June for example, the car had been driven 7.33 miles in 18 minutes; there had been two rapid accelerations and two incidents of hard braking.

Desjardins Group announced as of Feb. 1 it would no longer offer new mortgages for properties in “0-20 year” flood zones — where there is a five per cent chance of flooding in any given year — because of what it called the rising effect of climate change.

There are some exceptions: buyers can get financing for up to 65 per cent a home’s selling price if the previous owner had a Desjardins mortgage and the property has protective measures to prevent flooding. But the company’s decision has left mayors of low-lying towns worried that homeowners will be left with properties that no one will buy or that are massively devalued.

What the title says. Before you had to choose either SMS / call via phone or a very clunky code grid.

Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early stages of monetizing our user base,” and proceeds to say that it will continue to sell users’ content to companies that want to train LLMs and that it will also begin “increased use of artificial intelligence in our advertising solutions.”

The long-awaited S-1 filing reveals much of what Reddit users knew and feared: That many of the changes the company has made over the last year in the leadup to an IPO are focused on exerting control over the site, sanitizing parts of the platform, and monetizing user data.

Posting here because of the privacy implications of all this, but I wonder if at some point there should be an "Enshittification" community :-)

Yesterday, the business section of El País, the Spanish newspaper of record, published this story.

It details how now people are investing in "tokens" using the blockchain, in something that looks pretty much like a regular REIT to me. 12 % average annual return, 6 % to 10 % MER. I already know the end of this movie.

I've contacted the local regulator (the Spanish SEC if you want) and asked them if they have published any information about this scam very sophisticated product.

I was wondering if this is also a thing outside of Spain. We can't have been the first ones to invent this shit.

If you can't access it due to the paywall I can send you a PDF, just DM me.

Hi,

In Spain (and probably other places in Europe) we've recently seen a deluge of cookie banners that offer you the option to reject tracking cookies for a fee. The regular GDPR forms are therefore slightly broken, as you get several options: accept, reject (which doesn't work in most cases), and buy a subscription to reject. Consent-O-Matic, for example, is having a hard time. I don't doubt it'll get corrected in time, but I want to talk about something tangential.

Cookie consent has (at least) two layers: the browser layer (where we might delete cookies, reject third party cookies, etc) and the site UI layer (where we're presented with an option when we load the page). This means we can reject third-party cookies at the browser layer and then accept whatever form at the site UI layer.

With the set up mentioned above, is there really any difference between accepting cookies and rejecting cookies? No tracking cookie are going to get installed in my computer anyway. This, combined with an ad blocker, makes the browsing experience exactly the same whether I accept or reject the cookie form. Is there anything I'm missing here?

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) allows foreign states and non-state actors to obtain compromising sensitive personal data about key European personnel and leaders.

Key insights:

• Our investigation highlights a widespread trade in data about sensitive European personnel and leaders that exposes them to blackmail, hacking and compromise, and undermines the security of their organisations and institutions.

• These data flow from Real-Time Bidding (RTB), an advertising technology that is active on almost all websites and apps. RTB involves the broadcasting of sensitive data about people using those websites and apps to large numbers of other entities, without security measures to protect the data. This occurs billions of times a day.

• Our examination of tens of thousands of pages of RTB data reveals that EU military personnel and political decision makers are targeted using RTB.

• This report also reveals that Google and other RTB firms send RTB data about people in the U.S. to Russia and China, where national laws enable security agencies to access the data. RTB data are also broadcast widely within the EU in a free-for-all, which means that foreign and non-state actors can indirectly obtain them, too.

• RTB data often include location data or time-stamps or other identifiers that make it relatively easy for bad actors to link them to specific individuals. Foreign states and non-state actors can use RTB to spy on target individuals’ financial problems, mental state, and compromising intimate secrets. Even if target individuals use secure devices, data about them will still flow via RTB from personal devices, their friends, family, and compromising personal contacts.

• In addition, private surveillance companies in foreign countries deploy RTB data for surreptitious surveillance. We reveal “Patternz”, a previously unreported surveillance tool that uses RTB to profile 5 billion people, including the children of their targets.

• Our examination of RTB data reveals Cambridge Analytica style psychological profiling of target individuals’ movements, financial problems, mental health problems and vulnerabilities, including if they are likely survivors of sexual abuse.

• Real-Time Bidding's security flaw is a national security problem

I wrote this article for the Montreal Gazette a few months ago and I think it might be a good idea to share it here. If a few more people freeze their credit files and they avoid a potential id theft disaster in the future, that's good enough for me.

For people outside of Quebec: contact your representatives and demand provincial / federal action!

Gift link, read freely :-)