Daily Archives: May 2, 2023

TECH giants must be forced to remove extremist videos that spread hatred, a review says.

Ministers must ensure illegal material that glorifies terrorist activity posted on social media platforms such as YouTube is pulled using powers in proposed online safety legislation.

The recommendation came from the governments faith engagement adviser Colin Bloom in his 159-page independent review published yesterday.

Bloom said the government must exert much greater pressure on the online giants.

He also said that content in other languages which may not be illegal but incites hatred towards religious groups must be taken down.

Bloom also said any other kind of violent prejudice, racism or misogyny should be treated as harmful and be removed.

He added that it should be removed on the basis it incites violence or religious-based sectarianism which would be damaging for children and adults.

Ministers decided last year that controversial measures to the online safety bill forcing tech firms to take down legal but harmful material would be axed.

Critics had said that the proposals were a major threat to free speech.

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Tech giants must be forced to remove sick extremist videos, review says... - The US Sun

LONDON Britains tough new plan to police the internet has left politicians in a stand-off with WhatsApp and other popular encrypted messaging services. Deescalating that row will be easier said than done.

The Online Safety Bill, the United Kingdoms landmark effort to regulate social media giants, gives regulator Ofcom the power to require tech companies to identify child sex abuse material in private messages.

But the proposals have prompted Will Cathcart, boss of the Meta-owned messaging app, whose encrypted service is widely-used in Westminsters own corridors of power, to claim it would rather be blocked in the U.K. than compromise on privacy.

The core of what we do is a private messaging service for billions of people around the world, Cathcart told POLITICO in March when he jetted in to London to lobby ministers over the upcoming bill. When the U.K., a liberal democracy, says, Oh, it is okay to scan everyones private communication for illegal content, that emboldens countries around the world that have very different definitions of illegal content to propose the same thing, he added.

WhatsApps smaller rival, Signal, has also said it could stop providing services in the U.K. if the bill requires it to scan messages echoing claims from the tech industry that date back more than a decade that they cant create backdoors in encrypted digital services, even to protect kids online, because to do so opens the products up to vulnerabilities from bad actors, including foreign governments.

We cant just let thousands of pedophiles get away with it. That wouldnt be responsible or proportionate for a government to do, Science and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan told POLITICO in February.

Ministers are keen to lower the temperature. But doing so will prove challenging, two former ministers told POLITICO on the condition of anonymity, given the likelihood of pushback from MPs, the complexity of the technology and the emotiveness of the issue.

Finding a compromise is unlikely to be easy and the row mirrors similar debates that are underway in the European Union and Australia over just how accountable tech platforms should be for potentially harmful content on encrypted services.

The debate over whether the requirements of the bill can be met while protecting privacy centers around client-side scanning.

While leaders at Britains National Cyber Security Centre and security agency GCHQ said last July they believe such technology can simultaneously protect children and privacy, other experts dispute their findings.

A raft of cryptographers criticized the technique in a report called Bugs in Our Pockets in 2021 prompting tech giant Apple to abandon plans to introduce client-side scanning on its services. In Australia, the countrys eSafety Commissioner recently published a report highlighting how the likes of Microsoft and Apple had few, if any, mechanisms to track child sexual abuse material, including via their encrypted services.

This is not only companies really taking a blind eye to live crime scenes happening on their platforms, but theyre also failing to properly harden their systems and storage against abuse, Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told POLITICO. Its akin to leaving a home open to an intruder. Once that bad actor is inside the house, good luck getting them out.

Cybersecurity experts agree the U.K. bills demands are incompatible with a desire to protect encryption. They claim that privacy is not a fungible issue services either have it or they dont. And they warn that politicians should be wary of undermining such protections in ways that would make peoples online experiences potentially open to abuse or hacking.

In essence, end-to-end encryption involves not having a door, or if you want to use a postal analogy, not having a sorting office for the state to search. Client-side-scanning, despite the claims of its proponents, does seem to involve some kind of level of access, some kind of ability to sort and scan, and therefore theres no way of confining that to good use by lawful credible authorities and liberal democracies, Ciaran Martin, the former chief executive of the governments National Cyber Security Centre said.

Ministers insist that they support strong encryption and privacy, but say it cannot come at the cost of public safety.

Tech companies should be researching technology to identify child sex abuse before messages are encrypted, Donelan said. But the government also appears to be searching for a way to cool the row, and Donelan insisted the measure would be a last resort.

That element of the bill is like a safety mechanism that can be enacted, should it ever be needed to. It might never be needed because there might be other solutions in place, she said.

One official in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), not authorized to speak on the record but familiar with government discussions, said DSIT wanted to find a way through and is having talks with anyone that wants to discuss this with us.

Melanie Dawes, Ofcoms chief executive, told POLITICO that any efforts to break encryption in the name of safety would have to meet stringent rules, and such requests would be made in only the most extreme situations.

Theres a high bar for Ofcom to be able to require the use of a technology in order to secure safety, she said.

Peers in the unelected House of Lords, the U.K. parliaments revising chamber, waded into the issue Thursday.

Richard Allan, a Lib Dem peer who was Facebooks chief lobbyist in Europe until 2019, led the charge, saying tech companies will feel theyre unable to offer their products in the UK under the bill. He said undermining encryption opened the doors to hostile states and accused the government of playing a high stakes game of chicken with tech companies.

But Beeban Kidron, a crossbench peer who has been leading much of the work in the Lords around child safety, said although she had some sympathy for Allans arguments, Big Tech companies had to do more to protect users privacy themselves.

Wilf Stevenson, who is managing Labours response to the bill in the Lords, said he was not convinced the governments plans were right for the present day, let alone the future. He added that under the bill Ofcom is expected to be both gamekeeper and poacher, with power to regulate tech companies and inspect private messages.

But Stephen Parkinson, who is guiding the bill through the Lords on behalf of the government, defended the legislation. The bill contains strong safeguards for privacy, he said, echoing Donelans statement that powers to inspect messages were a last resort designed to be used only in cases of suspected terrorism and child sexual exploitation.

Messaging services including Signal and WhatsApp are hoping for a ministerial climbdown but few see one coming.

There is little prospect of large swathes of MPs, who will have the final say on the bill, riding to their rescue, according to two former ministers who have worked on the legislation.

People are scared if they go in and fight over this, even for very genuine reasons, it could be very easily portrayed that theyre trying to block protecting kids, one former Cabinet minister, a party loyalist, who worked on an earlier draft of the bill, said.

The second former minister said MPs havent engaged with it terribly much on a very practical level because it is really hard.

Tech companies have made significant efforts to frame this issue in the false binary that any legislation that impacts private messaging will damage end-to-end encryption and will mean that encryption will not work or is broken. That argument is completely false, opposition Labour frontbencher Alex Davies-Jones, said in a debate last June.

The widespread leaking of MPs WhatsApp messages has also undermined perceptions of the platforms privacy credentials, the former Cabinet minister quoted above suggests.

If you are sharing stuff on WhatsApp with people thats inappropriate, theres a good chance its going to end up in the public domain anyway. The encryption doesnt stop that because somebody screenshots it and copies it and sends it on, they lamented.

WhatsApp does have one ally in the former Brexit secretary and long-time civil liberties campaigner David Davis, though.

Right across the board there are a whole series of weaknesses the government hasnt taken on board, he told POLITICO of the bill.

And on WhatsApp and Signals threats to leave the U.K., Davis thinks a point could be made.

Well, I sort of hope they do. The truth is their model depends on complete privacy, he said.

Update: This article has been updated to include comments from the latest House of Lords debate on the Online Safety Bill.

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UK locks horns with WhatsApp over threat to break encryption - POLITICO Europe

Constellation Research principal analyst and CEO R 'Ray' Wang argues why tech innovators cannot pause artificial intelligence advancements.

IBM's top boss projected that some of its non-facing roles will be replaced by artificial intelligence in years to come.

"I do believe, and Ive said this before, that A.I. is going to replace many clerical white-collar jobs, and thats the kind which I expect A.I. will replace over the next five years," CEO Arvind Krishna told FOX Business' Liz Claman on "The Claman Countdown" Tuesday.

But it's "not as simple as jobs go away," he added.

"The number of jobs, though, perhaps in customer care, in coding, in business process, in developing artificial intelligence is going to increase so much that the net increase is going to be positive while theres a movement from one area to the other."

AI WILL ONLY GET 'SMARTER AND SMARTER' OVER TIME: RAY WANG

Krishna also said Monday that hiring for back-office positions, such as human resources, which are non-customer facing, is expected to slow down or possibly be suspended.

"I could easily see 30% of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period," he said in an interview with Bloomberg.

There are roughly 26,000 workers in non-customer-facing roles.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna during an interview in New York May 1, 2023. (Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

A spokesperson for IBM told FOX Business that while there is "no blanket hiring pause in place," the company "is being deliberate and thoughtful in our hiring with a focus on revenue-generating roles."

AI CAN NOW HELP DIRECT YOUR CAREER PATH

It is also "being very selective when filling jobs that dont directly touch our clients or technology," the spokesperson continued. IBM also noted that it's still actively hiring for thousands of positions.

Meanwhile, advances have been made recently in the AI space.

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San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind ChatGPT, rolled out its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-4 in March. Other tech giants have invested in competing tools such as Google's "Bard."

These advanced tools generate text, images and other content resembling the work of humans.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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IBM to pause hiring for certain jobs that could be replaced by AI - Fox Business

Falling demand for Googles search ads and Facebooks display ads has stabilized, with the digital ad giants each reporting a slight uptick in growth this week.

But Snap, a smaller company, still faces stiff competition from the likes of TikTok. Snap has also been hit by privacy changes made by Apple, which make it harder for advertisers to collect data and show highly targeted pitches.

Others are also continuing to grapple with the ad slump. Advertising revenue at YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, declined 3 percent in the first three months of the year.

Snap was founded in 2011 and went public in 2017. It is a growth stock, meaning investors expect it to expand rapidly. As recently as 2021, Snap reported revenue growth that doubled its previous years results. That has slowed dramatically over the last year amid macroeconomic uncertainty in the face of inflation and rising interest rates, culminating in this quarters decline.

Snaps stock fell 65 percent over the last year, dragging its valuation below $16 billion earlier this week. Thats less than what venture capitalists valued the company at before it went public in 2017.

Like much of the tech industry, Snap has spent the last year laying off staff and paring back creative and ambitious side projects. And like much of the tech industry, it is going big on artificial intelligence.

Snap recently unveiled a chatbot called My AI that allows Snapchat users to chat with the bot individually or with a group. The bot, powered by OpenAI, was met with some criticism from users. Snap said its users were sending more than two million messages a day to the bot.

Snap is also pushing for more revenue from subscriptions. Three million users pay $4 a month for Snapchat+, which gives them access to extra features.

Jasmine Enberg, an analyst with Insider Intelligence, wrote in a report that the company had not yet translated the excitement around its new products into revenue, which did not change the reality that its core business is struggling, she wrote.

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Snap's Sales Fall for First Time as a Public Company - The New York Times