A Boring Dystopia
www.bbc.co.uk
cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/18923980 > > Health Secretary Wes Streeting has dismissed suggestions that plans to provide weight loss jabs to unemployed people with obesity are "dystopian". > > > >The UK government is partnering with pharmaceutical giant Lilly who are running a five-year trial in Greater Manchester to test if the weight-loss drug Mounjaro can help get more people back to work and prevent obesity-related diseases to ease the strain on the NHS in England. > > > >The announcement prompted a backlash, with accusations that the government was stigmatising unemployed individuals and reducing people to their economic value. > > > >Speaking on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Streeting said the jabs were part of a broader healthcare plan, adding that he was "not interested in some dystopian future where I involuntarily jab unemployed people who are overweight".
theintercept.com
>The United States’ secretive Special Operations Command is looking for companies to help create deepfake internet users so convincing that neither humans nor computers will be able to detect they are fake, according to a procurement document reviewed by The Intercept. >The plan, mentioned in a new 76-page wish list by the Department of Defense’s Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, outlines advanced technologies desired for country’s most elite, clandestine military efforts. “Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content,” the entry reads. >The document specifies that JSOC wants the ability to create online user profiles that “appear to be a unique individual that is recognizable as human but does not exist in the real world,” with each featuring “multiple expressions” and “Government Identification quality photos”... >... The Pentagon has already been caught using phony social media users to further its interests in recent years. In 2022, Meta and Twitter removed a propaganda network using faked accounts operated by U.S. Central Command, including some with profile pictures generated with methods similar to those outlined by JSOC. A 2024 Reuters investigation revealed a Special Operations Command campaign using fake social media users aimed at undermining foreign confidence in China’s Covid vaccine. >Last year, Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, expressed interest in using video “deepfakes,” a general term for synthesized audiovisual data meant to be indistinguishable from a genuine recording, for “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns.” >... special operations troops “will use this capability to gather information from public online forums,” with no further explanation of how these artificial internet users will be used... >The offensive use of this technology by the U.S. would, naturally, spur its proliferation and normalize it as a tool for all governments. “What’s notable about this technology is that it is purely of a deceptive nature,” said Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute. “There are no legitimate use cases besides deception, and it is concerning to see the U.S. military lean into a use of a technology they have themselves warned against. This will only embolden other militaries or adversaries to do the same, leading to a society where it is increasingly difficult to ascertain truth from fiction and muddling the geopolitical sphere.” >Both Russia and China have been caught using deepfaked video and user avatars in their online propaganda efforts, prompting the State Department to announce an international “Framework to Counter Foreign State Information Manipulation” in January. “Foreign information manipulation and interference is a national security threat to the United States as well as to its allies and partners,” a State Department press release said. “Authoritarian governments use information manipulation to shred the fabric of free and democratic societies”...
I received several texts today on my personal phone number addressed to a minor child in my household for whom I provide health insurance from Kaiser. 1. I opted out of Kaiser text message communications. They don't respect it because Marketing? 2. The messages are addressing a minor child, yet sent to me, the adult. Kaiser would know their age. If they're young, directly texting them is a violation of parental consent. If they're a dependent there could be all kinds of privacy concerns for say a teen who maybe doesn't want their parents to be involved in such conversations. 3. I went to Kaiser's website to make a complaint. They don't provide an e-mail contact so you have to use a web submission form. Attachments (e.g. screenshots) aren't allowed. I copied in the text of the text messages after noting my concerns above and tried to submit. The web form said "unsupported characters", which I then spent 30 minutes trying to guess which of the characters from the texts they sent me might be unsupported by their website. 4. I decided to call their web support to find out which characters were unsupported, I'm sure I wasn't the first person to have the issue. They asked for personal identifying information that isn't necessary to provide website support, spent 5 minutes locating my account, and then told me they'd have to transfer me to a different region as they don't support my region. 5. They transferred me and I received an audio notice that the region was experiencing technical difficulties and the call disconnected. 6. I went back to the web form to open a complaint about their web form and submitted it suggesting they identify which characters are not permitted. The form also is about 3 lines of text high but accepts 1,000 characters which makes it very difficult to read as the web user (I'm sure a dark pattern to reduce form submission) 7. I called support again to try to reengage them to find out if they could identify the characters so I could submit the ticket myself. I got a different agent and had to tell them my original complaint and then what had just happened. They said they didn't know which characters were permissible, that my regions support shouldn't be down as they had no alerts, and wouldn't be able to find out which characters the form could use, despite being web support. They said they could take my complaint over the phone. 8. I asked what else they needed to make the complaint. The woman said just a minute and pulled up a form after talking to a colleague and asked me to start from the beginning to make my compliant. I hung up. 9. I went back on the website, typed out the entirety of the text messages I had received, my concern and the form allowed me to submit. The text messages must have had a hidden character or space that wasn't visible to me when copying/pasting. Now I wait to hear back on my two complaints. All so that, after furiously and competently struggling against the machine, I get back to a place where maybe if I'm lucky they will respect my communication preferences, not contact my child without my permission, potentially fix their shit website, which would leave me maybe about as good off as I was before I was aware of these issues. I feel like Calvin at the bottom of the big snowball hill he and Hobbes used, only in the modern US it's a shit snowball and it's full of companies who are technologically incompetent and aren't incentivized to follow even the laws they likely helped shaped through lobbying. The above issue is hardly even bad compared to other situations I or others have been through, it's the routiniety of it that is so dystopian.
www.wired.com
The ambitious identity-verification project Worldcoin, now called World, wants a future where humans are “orb-verified.” Sam Altman, the cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, one of the most dramatic tech companies of the modern era. An inkling of Worldcoin began in 2019 when Altman began exploring identity verification that could be used in universal basic income schemes. He teamed up with technologist Alex Blania to turn the idea into a reality. In a world of rapidly advancing AI, they theorized, it would be important for a human to prove they were not a bot. The answer they came up with relied on individuals using iris-scanning tech to generate private tokens that would verify their identities around the world. Worldcoin, then, is the ultimate attempt at tech solutionism: A human-grade AI world that Altman is building might also be technologically regulated by a tool that Altman has his hands in.
> Just four airlines control 80% of the airline industry — the most concentrated it’s ever been. And they’re using their power over consumers, and airports, to jack up prices. But this small airport in Missoula, Montana, is showing how to break the major carriers’ stranglehold.
m.koreatimes.co.kr
More than 3,600 people died alone in their homes in Korea last year, data showed Thursday, with middle-aged and elderly men accounting for more than half of such deaths. The number of "lonely deaths" came to 3,661 in 2023, up from 3,559 the previous year, according to data compiled by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The figure indicates that 1.04 out of every 100 deaths in Korea were attributed to solitary deaths last year.
Hi everyone. I’m on my work computer on the perennially terrible Lebanese internet, in a relatively safe town. I’m talking about some stupid client KPIs in a meeting with a bunch of people around the world. An “important” meeting. The clients assume I’m in Dubai or somewhere like that, and I don’t correct them. I’ll get asked “How are things in Lebanon?” by some coworker in Dubai or Europe after the call and I’ll say the classic “Alhamdulillah, my family and I are okay.” And we’re safe, we haven’t been bombed, not personally. I am lucky to work with decent people, but how could they understand. Will HR give me shit if they learn how much time I’ve spent out and about helping move essentials to shelters in the “dangerous outside world” instead of just burying myself at home “until it’s over”? Maybe I can get fired for putting myself in danger. Or maybe they give me leeway as a relatively senior person with the best English in my team who they get to pay less than everyone else because I don’t have a French passport - what a steal! (They pay me okay, and quite well compared to others around me, but we all know what this arrangement really is) But corporate work, in normal times, rots the soul from the inside out. This is worse. I have to stare at the bad screen for hours while the EMTs dig people from under their homes. I have a duty to at least try to help my people, but I can’t. If I quit my job, my family loses this home and this security, and we have no place to go now that our original town is being bombed. I don’t come from money. I can’t just move or buy a house abroad or even a plane ticket (Lebanese people with no other nationality can’t go many places without a long visa process). I can’t “just move to Europe bro”, I can’t “just move to Dubai bro”. I have responsibilities. I’d love to move, but I can’t. Maybe I should. Naturally, even nice coworkers cannot comprehend this. Besides, they need my input on the KPIs. This client is very important and number must go up after all. I hear another thud in the distance, through the crickets, I feel it in the pit of my stomach. Not close enough to threaten my life, but close enough to understand I might be next and that no area is truly safe. ___ This isn’t a woe is me post and I don’t want people in the comments feeling too sorry for my situation yeah. I still have my family, four limbs and two eyes, my home, a source of income in actual usable currency. Save your real sorrow for the people who have lost more both here and in the occupied territories. It could have been me in Gaza, it could have been you. ___ Please donate to the Lebanese Red Cross if you have the ability. Our people in the orange jumpsuits are our pride and they need everything they can get, especially now that they’re being hit as well. Relatively transparent and reputable org with boots on the ground and a functional donation platform, please consider helping.
www.theatlantic.com
The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!” As Milton made landfall, causing a series of tornados, a verified account on X reposted a TikTok video of a massive funnel cloud with the caption “WHAT IS HAPPENING TO FLORIDA?!” The clip, which was eventually removed but had been viewed 662,000 times as of yesterday evening, turned out to be from a video of a CGI tornado that was originally published months ago. Scrolling through these platforms, watching them fill with false information, harebrained theories, and doctored images—all while panicked residents boarded up their houses, struggled to evacuate, and prayed that their worldly possessions wouldn’t be obliterated overnight—offered a portrait of American discourse almost too bleak to reckon with head-on. Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants... ... “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary”... ... As one dispirited meteorologist wrote on X this week, “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes.” She followed with: “I can’t believe I just had to type that”...
laist.com
>This week, the Anaheim City Council voted to make it a crime to lie down or sleep on public sidewalks and benches. People who violate that law can be jailed and prosecuted with a misdemeanor, according to the ordinance. >“The sidewalk belongs to everybody,” Councilmember Jose Diaz said, according to the O.C. Register. “Not to an individual who wants to grab that piece of land. It’s not yours to grab. You either take services from us or you get out.”
www.wired.com
>Chilimbi says the first step toward AI agents will likely be chatbots that proactively recommend products based on what they know of your habits and interests, as well as a grasp of broader trends. He acknowledges that making this feel nonintrusive will be crucial. “If it’s no good and annoying, then you’ll tune it out,” he says. “But if it comes up with surprising things that are interesting, you’ll use it more.” >Future AI agents might, for instance, navigate various websites to sort out a parking ticket, or they might operate a PC to file a tax return.
Edited later to add: The original press release seems to be gone now, but here is what is claimed to be the revised release, and an article on the same topic. https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/polizei-dortmund-greta-gewaltbereit-100.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/german-politician-calls-greta-thunberg-102611513.html
ipmnewsroom.org
This is ~~a~~ [edit] several months old, but I was following up on the case and saw it for the first time now. > Grayson told Adkins there was a warrant out for his arrest and issued him a Notice to Appear, a document equivalent to an arrest, recommending felony drug charges against him. The case dragged out for two years before it was dropped, and a new investigation reveals the warrant — and other evidence Grayson said he had against Adkins — never actually existed. Body camera footage shows Grayson admitting to the chief of police he had no evidence to recommend charges, but even after the footage surfaced in court, no other department or agency was notified. Wtf are we doing?
Transcription via user I CAST FIST >Quoting the text for easier read to everyone: > The desire to exclusively engage with media and art made by "unproblematic" artists is a direct result of Americans viewing media consumption as an inherently political act because that is the supreme promise of Western prosperity and the religion of consumerism, and that's because it's seemingly all that's left. We've been stripped and socialized out of any real political energy and agency. Our ability to consume is the only thing remaining that's "ours" in late capitalism, and as a result it's become a stand-in for (or perhaps the sole defining quality of) every aspect of being alive today - consuming is activism, it's love, it's thinking, it's sex, it's fill in the blank. When the act of consuming is all you have left and indeed the only thing society tells you is valuable and meaningful, the act must necessarily be a moral one, which is why people send themselves down manic spirals deciding what, who is "problematic" or not, because for us the stakes are that high now.
www.themoscowtimes.com
cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/3535523 > [Archived link](https://web.archive.org/web/20241005042012/https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/10/02/russia-to-accept-mandarins-instead-of-money-amid-payment-difficulties-a86543) > > > > Russian companies have established a barter trade system with Pakistan to facilitate economic exchanges without the need for monetary transactions, as they seek to overcome challenges with payments related to Western sanctions on Moscow. > > The alternative trade arrangement was signed at the first Pakistan-Russia Trade and Investment Forum in Moscow. According to the Russian state media outlet TASS, the first Russian company to use the mechanism will be Astarta-Agrotrading, which will supply Pakistan with chickpeas and lentils. Pakistan’s Meskay + Femtee Trading Company will reciprocate by providing mandarins and rice. > > Under the terms of the agreement, Russia will export 20,000 tons of chickpeas, while Pakistan will supply an equivalent amount of rice. Another contract stipulates that Russia will send 15,000 tons of chickpeas and 10,000 tons of lentils in exchange for 15,000 tons of mandarins and 10,000 tons of potatoes. > > [...] > > While monetary transactions are under increasing scrutiny due to international sanctions against Russia in retaliation for its invasion of Ukraine, barter schemes offer companies a way to circumvent complications by exchanging goods directly rather than involving bank payments. Such deals help avoid attention from monitoring organizations tasked with ensuring compliance with sanctions. > > This is not Russia's first exploration of barter trade as a solution to payment issues. In August, Reuters reported that Russia had been in discussions with China about resuming barter trade, particularly in metals and agricultural products. However, that project has been slow to gain momentum, as individual companies have struggled to meet the specific needs of both sides.
www.wired.com
cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/27154690 > From Trump campaign signs to Planned Parenthood bumper stickers, license plate readers around the US are creating searchable databases that reveal Americans’ political leanings and more.
Paywall removed https://archive.is/mcA9u
Every time I watch the news, I feel like we are living through the final act of Jojo Rabbit. 