I’m not sure about the blip.

As I recall, ICE was receiving a lot of media attention over the killing of Renee Good, and that was followed with the killing of Alex Pretti. Reddit was accused of running ICE ads on its platform, and there was a backlash amongst its users.

If this backlash is part of the blip, then the following plateau is curious. Was that some kind of intervention by Reddit, and what exactly is that? Retraction of the ads? Soft-Censorship? It sounds like Reddit actively polices efforts to draw users off the platform.

In all, ShinyHunters claims to have stolen close to 1 petabyte of data belonging to the company and many of its customers, many of whom use Telus Digital as a BPO provider for customer support operations. BleepingComputer has not been able to independently confirm the total size of the stolen data.

The threat actor shared the names of 28 well-known companies allegedly impacted by the breach. However, BleepingComputer will not disclose the names of these companies, as we have been unable to independently confirm whether they were impacted.

The threat actor says that much of the data for these customers relates to BPO services provided by Telus Digital, including customer support and call center outsourcing, agent performance ratings, AI-powered customer support tools, fraud detection and prevention, and content moderation solutions.

I believe Telus also handles healthcare data for Alberta and beyond. Do we know if that’s impacted?

Agreed, there’s a confusion between “balance” and “clout”. When media just invite people based on right or left clout, audiences lose in terms of quality information. We end up receiving echo chambers on the airwaves because these clout chasers repeat talking points at us. Clout chasers in turn just want to maintain their own reputation and this loop turns into a toxic signals circle.

Is that a back handed way of suggesting that the US and Israel are one and the same?

Jon Stewart did an excellent interview with Maria Ressa of the Philippines, and they outlined how her country modelled itself with the US system of government. Unfortunately, the Philippines was used as a testing ground for American social media platforms, proving that the collapse of one branch of government did not engage any checks to balance the loss.

In her opinion, the collapse of one branch essentially meant the full collapse of government.

China alone is pushing the world into the renewables age. For the rest of us, we just follow the wave.

Nuclear does not have similar issues. Nuclear is a super long game that basically leaves a few states left to explore and invest in this area. Nuclear power is basically a bespoke option that needs to be developed like an art piece and an investment. Any nuclear power installation requires massive budgets, massive budget overruns, and over 10 years of development and installation which will overrun as well. By the time a nuclear project breaks ground, only the next generation will possibly enjoy whatever power is generated.

Nuclear also requires massive investments of teams of specialists. They basically need teams to operate over huge periods of time to retain the institutional knowledge of building, maintaining, and improving upon these installations. In that sense nuclear is similar to rail companies in that we want teams with over 100 years of experience in this business to maintain a certain level of competence.

Nuclear is fun to drop like in SimCity or Civilzation, but it is completely, seriously inaccessible for many.

Canada is harming its relationship with the US?

Are we talking about the Americans electing a criminal felon as President, who appears to be facing allegations of decades long pedophilia, and seems to be part of a global scale honey pot and blackmail operation that targeted people around the world? Did that damage trust and credibility? And did we mention the Americans who seem involved in the debauchery, death, trauma, and abuse from trafficking vulnerable underaged girls around the world for this operation for decades are also not facing any justice? Instead, they all appear to be closing ranks and maintaining an iron curtain of silence?

Oh, and world leaders and dignitaries have to grapple with the knowledge that these same Americans remain in positions of power and gatekeeping positions throughout the US government system?

Plus this same US President is extracting wealth for his billionaire friends? Wealth that the Western powers created a rules based order together to generate?

By the time the Americans manage to uncollapse their justice system, and maybe codify some laws to avoid the total collapse of their society in their legislative branch, it will be decades.

Canada is not throwing a hissy fit, we’re literally working around a gasping goon where an ally should be, and we’re trying to keep the lights and the heat on for the rest of us until this blows over.

I’ll point out that others say similar things about Reddit.

https://kopitalk.net/post/179329#comment_818579

I see X users these days as the frogs in the slow boiling pots.

I sense that some of the people who remain in X had some rationales. Those who liked what they saw in terms of abuse or bad behaviour would naturally stay for more.

Perhaps others felt their voices would resist mis/disinformation, or contribute to greater discussion. But, those who chose to stay, regardless of reason, ended up conditioning themselves to receive or disregard abuse beyond all sense.

Now the platform clearly violates its members, and Musk has once again affirmed publicly that he is a white supremacist. Users - including government accounts - who remain have unwittingly become members of an extremist, white supremacist website that peddles CSAM materials.

I think it’s the stuff of movies, and something a villain, like the Joker, would have done.

Axon’s rep basically says that their mass surveillance cameras don’t see colour, just people. Then follows with the main factor is skin tone (??). A problem that was essentially noted as far back as…2019. What development in the technology is she talking about?

According to Ann-Li Cooke, Axon Enterprise’s director of responsible AI:

In response to the report, Cooke said there has been a development in the technology since 2019.

“There are gaps in both race and gender at that time,” she said. “As we did our due diligence on evaluating multiple models, we were also looking to see if there were race-based differences, and we found that in ideal conditions, that is not the case.

“Race is not the limiting factor today, the limiting factor is on skin tone. And so when there are varying conditions, such as distance [or] dim lighting, there will be different optical challenges with body-worn camera[s] — and all cameras — in detecting and matching darker-skinned individuals than lighter-skinned individuals.”

Also note that the facial-recognition technology seems to have a fatal flaw when it comes to women with darker skin.

However, Gideon Christian, an associate professor of AI and law at the University of Calgary, said the inequities attached to facial-recognition technology are too great to ignore and that he believes there is not enough recent research to suggest any significant improvement.

“Facial-recognition technology has been shown to have its worst error rate in identifying darker-skinned individuals, especially black females,” he said.

In some case studies, Christian said facial-recognition technology has shown about a 98 per cent accuracy rate in identifying white male faces, but that it also has about a 35 per cent error rate in identifying darker-skinned women.

You know what was a problem with the technology back in 2019? LLMs are coded by primarily white males, and their idea for “normal” hard codes bias into the models. These “AI” products essentially show their coders’ bias by discriminating what falls outside of that normal.

For example, from “How tech’s white male workforce feeds bias into AI”, by Aimee Picchi:

The report highlights several ways AI programs have created harmful circumstances to groups that already suffer from bias. Among them are:

An Amazon AI hiring tool that scanned resumes from applicants relied on previous hires’ resumes to set standards for ideal hires. However, the AI started downgrading applicants who attended women’s colleges or who included the word “women’s” in their resumes.
Amazon’s Rekognition facial analysis program had difficulty identifying dark-skinned women. According to one report, the program misidentified them as men, although the program had no problem identifying men of any skin tone.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-bias-problem-techs-white-male-workforce/

I’d like to piggyback off these remarks to add that Canada did have a secure digital communication system in Blackberry. I point out that system was criticized for being closed and “slow” to adapt to the changes brought by Apple.

But I’d simply take the view that Canada gave up on Blackberry. Blackberry’s entire reputation was based on secure communications catered towards corporate and enterprise environments - whether we liked it or not. Canada just gave way to less secure, more convenient American competitors. In so doing, we gave up a real option to American digital communications. Oh and by the way, the Americans still don’t have an answer to having all their telecommunication back doors getting hacked open.