You're on a ship hurtling through space and your crew's best engineers report that critical sub-systems - from water filtration, through to HVAC and food pods - are all failing. Evidence of sabotage. What do you do? World's governments: "Governments failed to reach a consensus [...] Many were forced to leave the talks early to catch flights, and negotiations were suspended at 8.30am when fewer than half of the countries were present"

the Guardian

Cop16 ends in disarray and indecision despite biodiversity breakthroughs

Conservation summit agrees to global levy on drugs from nature’s genetics, but developing nations furious at unmet funding promises

#biodiversity

Europe can come and take Aotearoa New Zealand's hedgehogs back, where they are thriving at the expense of native species. One of the most destructive animals introduced to the country, they are a primary threat to the keystone insect species Weta, eat endangered native lizards, cause ground nesting birds to abandon their nests, and eat their eggs. #conservation #extinction #aotearoa #nz

the Guardian

Hedgehogs ‘near threatened’ on red list after 30% decline over past decade

The mammals were once common across Europe but urban development has pushed them towards extinction

Good shortread by Goodin on the clandestine tracking platform Location X. Sold to government agencies, it supposedly exploits the unique 'advertising ID' accessible to the app layer on all Android phones, and (with optional user input) on iOS. The article has a brief mitigation walkthrough for phone owners.

Ars Technica

Location tracking of phones is out of control. Here’s how to fight back.

Unique IDs assigned to Android and iOS devices threaten your privacy. Who knew?

Thanks to @Christina for the share #infosec #privacy

From the organiser of the letter Newton-Rex, who resigned from Stability AI over its 'fair use' policy: "There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend vast sums on the first two – sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third – training data – for free”

the Guardian

Thom Yorke and Julianne Moore join thousands of creatives in AI warning

Statement comes as tech firms try to use creative professionals’ work to train AI models

#ai #ml

I've been a free & open source software advocate since the mid to late 90's. Stallman's contributions in this space have been foundational, but his poor behaviour has been long known. Sadly it's worse than many knew of, outlined here:

The Stallman report

The Stallman report

October 14th, 2024 Richard Stallman (aka “RMS”) is the founder of GNU and the Free Software Foundation and present-day voting member of the Fre...

The authors are not engaging in character assassination. Rather they recognise the harm this highly influential person's views may actively affirm & enable. No free pass when it comes to empowering abuse. I agree, he should leave the FSF

The low level of understanding as to the functioning of LLMs and ML continues to allow 'AI' to be publicly imagined as an entity, a being - an idea bolstered and proliferated through countless works of popular fiction and shoddy journalism. This is a vulnerable state for the public imagination, ripe for abuse, especially when coupled with the still prevalent myth of computational neutrality. As such I believe the unchecked spread of 'AI' needs to be fought as much with education as regulation.