Zajímavé aktuální zahraniční články

[Lukas.Dolezal]

Maďarsko potřebuje Piráty.

Hungarian government takes control of research institutes despite outcry

After months of struggle between Hungary’s research ministry and its scientific community, the nation’s parliament ratified a law on 2 July that gives the government control over the 40 or so institutes belonging to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS).

The government says that its aim is to make research more innovative. But the law, which also transfers ownership of the institutes’ properties to the new government-run Eötvös Loránd Research Network (ELKH), has prompted international outcry and raised concerns about academic freedom in Hungary.

[davkol]

Iowa Crops Look Like Food — But No One’s Eating Inside a system that traps farmers and screws up the planet.

…

Iowa has its beauty: It’s not flat, as many seem to believe, and although the scenery is not especially dramatic, this time of year it’s lush, with free-flowing waterways everywhere. Iowa farmers generally do not irrigate, which distinguishes the state from California, of course, as does the astonishing dominance of the almost exclusively two-crop economy based on corn and soybeans.

Yet Iowa is unrecognizable from centuries ago, when Europeans took the land for themselves. What were prairie and wetlands are now neatly partitioned grids of intensely cultivated land: the model for the farm as factory. Through a system of underground “tiles” (pipes, really) in the northern half of the state, most of the water has been drained from swamps, prairie potholes, and lakes into creeks and rivers, which in turn have been engineered to maximize flow.

Thus, much of the landscape has been reshaped to make large-scale mechanical farming as productive as possible. Twenty-three million acres are planted in corn and/or soybeans; that’s 63 percent of all the land in the state, and more than the land area of each of 20 states. Nor is Iowa alone. An area the size of Montana is planted in corn every year in the United States; less than 1 percent of that is sweet corn eaten by humans.

…

The farmers I spoke to don’t seem to know or care where their crop goes: Ethanol? Chicken feed? (Fifty-nine million mostly invisible chickens produce 16 billion eggs annually, statewide.) Cheetos? It’s all the same.

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Iowa is not just a two-crop state: There are several million cattle, those 20 million hogs, and at least twice as many laying hens, not to mention 12 million turkeys. The excrement produced by these animals, if it were an amount produced by humans, would make Iowa the most populous state in the country.

…

The state’s oil-based economy and its contribution to the climate crisis; the pollution caused by the runoff of chemicals and manure; the public health crisis that has resulted from the production of horribly raised animals and sinister, sickening junk food; the smaller farms that have been absorbed and the diminished communities that formerly thrived as networks of farm families…all of this has been written about well, elsewhere, and extensively.

Still, let me remind you that four companies control north of 60 percent of global proprietary seed sales. And in “Addressing Monopolization in America’s Food System,” the Open Markets Institute reports that “Monsanto has patented traits found in 80 percent of U.S. corn and over 90 percent of U.S. soybeans and has acquired more than 60 independent seed companies since the late 1980s.” Four companies sell three-quarters of the soybean seeds. The top four pork processors control two-thirds of the market; something like 50 million pigs are raised annually in Iowa, many in torturous confinement. I could go on.

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To address the climate, environment, animal welfare, and public health crises, we need decisive and radically different government action. Right now, almost all government programs and subsidies favor the corn-and-soybean obsession, and that’s what “the market” — Big Ag and Big Food — wants.

There are incentives and disincentives: Carrots and sticks to encourage crop rotations (instead of “corn on soybeans” or “corn on corn,” the two most common patterns) would begin to change things fast. So would encouraging the growing of actual food by getting land into the hands of a new wave of farmers who want to do things differently, which also would necessitate addressing the issue of land distribution. More positive changes would include the reintroduction of grazing animals in a mixed agriculture setting while banning or at least strictly controlling confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. So would setting up markets to sell local and regional food, and using the power of government to break up monopolies. These changes would make the impossible suddenly seem less so.

…

Mark Bittman
July 11, 2019
Medium/Heated

[Janka.Michailidu]

Human workers can listen to Google Assistant recordings

The company acknowledged that humans can access those recordings after some of its Dutch language audio snippets were leaked. Google product manager David Monsees acknowledged the leak in a blog post Thursday, and said the company is investigating the breach.

"We are conducting a full review of our safeguards in this space to prevent misconduct like this from happening again," he wrote.

More than 1,000 recordings were obtained by Belgian broadcaster VRT NWS, which noted in a story that some contained sensitive personal conversations—as well as information that identified the person speaking. Google says no user account information is associated with the recordings, and reviewers are instructed not to transcribe background conversations.

But VRT reporters could hear spoken home addresses in some of the recordings, and were able to track down the speakers. Some of these conversations were not directed at Assistant and happened either as background noise or as a mistaken recording when Assistant thought it was being spoken to, but wasn't.

taky na guardianu: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... rs-privacy

[Janka.Michailidu]

Money’s no object for Facebook, so hit it where it hurts

This is a landmark moment. It’s the biggest ever fine imposed by the FTC, the body set up to police American capitalism. And $5bn is a lot of money in anybody’s language. Anybody’s but Facebook’s. It represents just a month of revenues and the stock market knew it. Facebook’s capitalisation went up $6bn with the news. This was a fine that actually increased Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth.

But what it has exposed once and for all is a company that is out of control on a global scale.

[Janka.Michailidu]

Revealed: This Is Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual for Cops

Palantir is one of the most significant and secretive companies in big data analysis. The company acts as an information management service for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, corporations like JP Morgan and Airbus, and dozens of other local, state, and federal agencies. It’s been described by scholars as a “secondary surveillance network,” since it extensively catalogs and maps interpersonal relationships between individuals, even those who aren't suspected of a crime.

[davkol]

How U.S. Tech Giants Are Helping to Build China’s Surveillance State

An American organization founded by tech giants Google and IBM is working with a company that is helping China’s authoritarian government conduct mass surveillance against its citizens, The Intercept can reveal.

The OpenPower Foundation — a nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives with the aim of trying to “drive innovation” — has set up a collaboration between IBM, Chinese company Semptian, and U.S. chip manufacturer Xilinx. Together, they have worked to advance a breed of microprocessors that enable computers to analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently.

Shenzhen-based Semptian is using the devices to enhance the capabilities of internet surveillance and censorship technology it provides to human rights-abusing security agencies in China, according to sources and documents. A company employee said that its technology is being used to covertly monitor the internet activity of 200 million people.

Ryan Gallagher
July 11, 2019
The Intercept

[Jan.Prokop]

Russia's Secret Intelligence Agency Hacked: 'Largest Data Breach In Its History'
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman ... 1f74c36b11

[Janka.Michailidu]

You can probably be identified from your anonymized data

The researchers wrote a machine learning program and trained it on incomplete data sets to test their theory out. They used 210 demographic and survey data sets, and were able to identify people with a high degree of confidence, even in subsets representing just 1% of the data or less.

The result led them to question the whole de-identification concept:

Our results suggest that even heavily sampled anonymized datasets are unlikely to satisfy the modern standards for anonymization set forth by GDPR and seriously challenge the technical and legal adequacy of the de-identification release-and-forget model.

[davkol]

We Tested Europe’s New Lie Detector for Travelers — and Immediately Triggered a False Positive

They call it the Silent Talker. It is a virtual policeman designed to strengthen Europe’s borders, subjecting travelers to a lie detector test before they are allowed to pass through customs.

Prior to your arrival at the airport, using your own computer, you log on to a website, upload an image of your passport, and are greeted by an avatar of a brown-haired man wearing a navy blue uniform.

“What is your surname?” he asks. “What is your citizenship and the purpose of your trip?” You provide your answers verbally to those and other questions, and the virtual policeman uses your webcam to scan your face and eye movements for signs of lying.

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An EU research program has pumped some 4.5 million euros into the project, which is being managed by a consortium of 13 partners, including Greece’s Center for Security Studies, Germany’s Leibniz University Hannover, and technology and security companies like Hungary’s BioSec, Spain’s Everis, and Poland’s JAS.

The researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University believe that the system could represent the future of border security. In an academic paper published in June 2018, they stated that avatars like their virtual policeman “will be suitable for detecting deception in border crossing interviews, as they are effective extractors of information from humans.”However, some academics are questioning the value of the system, which they say relies on pseudoscience to make its decisions about travelers’ honesty.

Ray Bull, professor of criminal investigation at the University of Derby, has assisted British police with interview techniques and specializes in methods of detecting deception. He told The Intercept that the iBorderCtrl project was “not credible” because there is no evidence that monitoring microgestures on people’s faces is an accurate way to measure lying.

…

Earlier this year, researchers at the Milan-based Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights used freedom of information laws to obtain internal documents about the system. They received hundreds of pages; however, they were heavily redacted, with many pages completely blacked out.

“The attempt to suppress debate by withholding the documents that address these issues is really frightening,” said Riccardo Coluccini, a researcher at the Hermes Center. “It is absolutely necessary to understand the reasoning behind the funding process. What is written in those documents? How does the consortium justify the use of such a pseudoscientific technology?”

A study produced by the researchers in Manchester tested iBorderCtrl on 32 people and said that their results showed the system had 75 percent accuracy. The researchers noted, however, that their participant group was unbalanced in terms of ethnicity and gender, as there were fewer Asian or Arabic participants than white Europeans, and fewer women than men.

Giovanni Buttarelli, head of the EU’s data protection watchdog, told The Intercept that he was concerned that the iBorderCtrl system might discriminate against people on the basis of their ethnic origin.

…

Ryan Gallagher, Ludovica Jona
July 26, 2019
The Intercept

[davkol]

Enemies of the State? How governments and businesses silence land and environmental defenders

More than three people were murdered each week in 2018, with countless more criminalised, for defending their land and our environment.

Calls to protect the planet are growing louder – but around the world, those defending their land and our environment are being silenced. More than three such people were murdered on average every week in 2018, with attacks driven by destructive industries like mining, logging and agribusiness.

This year, our annual report on the killings of land and environmental defenders also reveals how countless more people were threatened, arrested or thrown in jail for daring to oppose the governments or companies seeking to profit from their land.

These are ordinary people trying to protect their homes and livelihoods, and standing up for the health of our planet. Often their land is violently grabbed to produce goods used and consumed across the world every day, from food, to mobile phones, to jewellery.

…

But deadly violence is only the most visible of the myriad threats that defenders face.

Across continents, governments and companies are also using countries’ courts and legal systems as instruments of oppression against those who threaten their power and interests.

That’s why this year, for the first time, we have documented the many ways that defenders are being criminalised, including:

• In some countries, the state is labelling defenders as terrorists or enemies of the state, as in the case of nine environmentalists who were jailed in Iran, accused of spying.
• As we have seen with the crackdown on anti-fracking activism in the UK, governments and industry are also flexing national laws to outlaw protest.

Criminalising defenders in this way makes attacks on them seem legitimate, making them more likely. These trends continue across the globe, helped by populist politicians who are stripping away vital environmental protections when we need them most.

The failure of many governments and companies to act responsibly, ethically or even legally is a major driving force behind crimes committed against land and environment defenders.

Businesses have a duty to ensure their customers are not unwittingly supporting projects that drive people out of their homes or devastate ecosystems. Consumers have a right to demand that these companies live up to their responsibilities.

Moreover, as our investigations have shown, the projects driving these environmental and human rights abuses are often funded by ordinary people’s savings or investments, more often than not without their knowledge. From energy to agriculture, so-called development projects in much of the world are driving rampant deforestation, mass displacement and climate chaos.

Governments, investors and business all have the power to protect the environment and those that defend it. Ordinary people – as consumers, pension holders and voters – can help make these changes happen.

July 30, 2019
Global Witness