20240422

Este articulazo de The Verge nos trae un vistazo a la frágil infraestructura de cables submarinos que hace posible Internet, de la flota que los repara constantemente, los desafios que se han convertido en su día a día, y lo precario de su situación.

“Cable industry professionals tend to be pragmatic people, preoccupied with the material realities of working planet-scale construction. But in conversations about landing high-bandwidth cables in digitally neglected regions or putting millions of people back in contact with every fiber strand melted together, they often hint at a sense of larger purpose, an awareness that they are performing a function vital to a world that, if they do their jobs well, will continue to be unaware of their service.”

Por otra parte, hay organizaciones que tienen responsabilidades e impacto en Internet como mínimo igual de importante que la reparación de cables submarinos, pero que no son tan diligentes. El reciente bloqueo masivo por error en Twitter de cuentas de divulgadoras científicas y otros medios es una cagada más en la lista desde que Eloncio asumió los mandos y se deshizo de gran parte de la plantilla. No será la última.

El primer genocidio habilitado y dirigido mediante IA en la historia de la humanidad lo está cometiendo.. Israel. Me parece una locura.

“The sources said that the approval to automatically adopt Lavender’s kill lists, which had previously been used only as an auxiliary tool, was granted about two weeks into the war, after intelligence personnel “manually” checked the accuracy of a random sample of several hundred targets selected by the AI system. When that sample found that Lavender’s results had reached 90 percent accuracy in identifying an individual’s affiliation with Hamas, the army authorized the sweeping use of the system. From that moment, sources said that if Lavender decided an individual was a militant in Hamas, they were essentially asked to treat that as an order, with no requirement to independently check why the machine made that choice or to examine the raw intelligence data on which it is based.”

“In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.”

Otro uso menos letal pero poco ético de la IA sigue siendo la generación de material que poco a poco difumina la validez de las imágenes como prueba documental: que Netflix lo haga, precisamente, en un documental sobre crímenes, lo hace todo todavía más turbio. Aunque no es la única mala práctica que rodea el creciente boom de los “True Crimes” en plataformas de streaming.

“Any type of manipulation of photos of a true crime documentary is controversial because a story — especially one as sensitive as Pan’s — should be told truthfully and unvarnished even when that story is being told through imagery.”

“Resorting to the tech to generate pictures of a real person, especially of somebody who’s still in jail and will only be eligible for parole around 2040, should raise some alarm bells,” 

Y hablando sobre buenas prácticas, durante décadas un simple fichero de texto (robots.txt) ha servido de contrato social para regular qué partes y a qué ritmo queremos que los robots de los buscadores indexen nuestra web. Pero si la elección está entre el respeto o adquirir más datos, la industria IA lo tiene claro.

“The robots.txt file governs a give and take; AI feels to many like all take and no give. But there’s now so much money in AI, and the technological state of the art is changing so fast that many site owners can’t keep up. And the fundamental agreement behind robots.txt, and the web as a whole — which for so long amounted to “everybody just be cool” — may not be able to keep up either.”

“As the AI companies continue to multiply, and their crawlers grow more unscrupulous, anyone wanting to sit out or wait out the AI takeover has to take on an endless game of whac-a-mole. They have to stop each robot and crawler individually, if that’s even possible, while also reckoning with the side effects. If AI is in fact the future of search, as Google and others have predicted, blocking AI crawlers could be a short-term win but a long-term disaster.”

Hablando de adaptar viejas herramientas, es llamativo descubrir que a día de hoy funciones importantes del sistema de tranvía/tren ligero de la ciudad de San Francisco sigue funcionando con.. ¡discos de  5¼”! Al menos hasta 2030, fecha en la que se espera haber sustituido el antiguo sistema por algo más adaptado a los tiempos que corren.

“Members of the SFMTA recently spoke with the ABC7 Bay Area News and detailed the agency’s use of three 5¼-inch floppy disks every morning. The floppies have been part of Muni Metro’s Automatic Train Control System (ATCS) since its installation in the Market Street subway stop in 1998. The ATCS has multiple components, “including computers onboard the trains that are tied into propulsion and brake systems, central and local servers, and communications infrastructure, like loop cable signal wires,” Michael Roccaforte, an SFMTA spokesperson, told Ars Technica.”

Y mirando hacia al futuro, el manga/anime Planetes ya avisaba de los potenciales peligros de la basura espacial. Justamente una startup japonesa comienza a plantear prototipos para intentar limpiarla.

Nuevo video para el tema de 2019 de Amon Tobin, igual de fascinante que su contrapartida musical.

20240410

Algunos de los empleados y empleadas de Google protestan ante un opaco contrato del gigante tecnológico con Israel, que provee a este estado de una instancia segura de cloud en suelo israelí dificilmente auditable por Google, y que quizá sí, quizá no, está siendo usada por el ejército israelí para desplegar técnicas IA de vigilancia y automatización de bombardeos y asesinatos en el genocidio de Gaza. 

Obviamente, como las instancias cloud no son supervisables, no hay pruebas de esto (¿cómo aguantaría Google si las hubiera?), pero cada vez más personal de Google piensa que esto huele fatal:

“There is no evidence Google or Amazon’s technology has been used in killings of civilians. The Google workers say they base their protests on three main sources of concern: the Israeli finance ministry’s 2021 explicit statement that Nimbus would be used by the ministry of defense; the nature of the services likely available to the Israeli government within Google’s cloud; and the apparent inability of Google to monitor what Israel might be doing with its technology.”

“Other Google workers point to what they know about Google Cloud as a source of concern about Project Nimbus. The cloud technology that the company ordinarily offers to its clients includes a tool called AutoML that allows a user to rapidly train a machine learning model using a custom dataset. Three workers interviewed by TIME said that the Israeli government could theoretically use AutoML to build a surveillance or targeting tool. There is no evidence that Israel has used Google Cloud to build such a tool, although the New York Times recently reported that Israeli soldiers were using the freely-available facial recognition feature on Google Photos, along with other non-Google technologies, to identify suspects at checkpoints. “Providing powerful technology to an institution that has demonstrated the desire to abuse and weaponize AI for all parts of war is an unethical decision,” says Gabriel Schubiner, a former researcher at Google. “It’s a betrayal of all the engineers that are putting work into Google Cloud.”

Esta asociación de mujeres suizas ha conseguido sentar un precedente de una importancia enorme: que un tribunal dictamine que el estado Suizo ha vulnerado los derechos humanos por inacción ante la presente crisis climática. El fallo judicial no tiene consecuencias vinculantes, pero el mensaje para todos los estados ya está ahí: no podéis eludir vuestra responsabilidad y dejarnos a nuestra suerte sin consecuencias.

Aunque los tribunales, como siempre, una de cal y otra de arena:

“The European Court of Human Rights’s ruling, in favour of the more than 2,000 Swiss women who brought the case, is expected to resonate in court decisions across Europe and beyond, and to embolden more communities to bring climate cases against governments.
But in a sign of the complexities of the growing wave of climate litigation, the court (ECtHR) rejected two other climate-related cases on procedural grounds. One of these was brought by a group of six Portuguese young people against 32 European governments and another by a former mayor of a low-lying French coastal town.”

Al no poder verlo directamente, por aquí lo del eclipse solar ha sido poco más que un titular, pero en Norteamérica ha sido todo un acontecimiento.

Amazon abandona la famosa idea del supermercado “mágico” en el que se nos cobraba lo que cogíamos sin tener que pasar por caja. Lo sorprendente es que en realidad no había ningún sistema de Inteligencia Artificial capaz de hacer esto por si solo: todo dependía de más de 1000 personas en India que te observaban en video y etiquetaban los pedidos para poder cobrar.

“Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.”

“Just Walk Out was first introduced in 2016, presenting Amazon’s biggest and boldest innovation in grocery shopping. The technology seemed incredible, but there were some stumbles. It often took hours for customers to receive receipts after leaving the store, largely because offshore cashiers were rewatching videos and assigning items to different customers. The system of scanners and video cameras in each store is also incredibly expensive.”

Para sorpresa de nadie, la manera en la que todos los billonarios por debajo de 30 años han conseguido sus fortunas, ha sido.. heredándolas de sus padres.

“There are already more billionaires than ever before (2,781), and the number is expected to soar in the coming years as an elderly generation of super-rich people prepare to give their fortunes to their children.”

“Research by Forbes magazine found there were 15 billionaires aged 30 or under but that none had created their own wealth, instead benefitting from huge inheritances.”

Esta fantasía de meritocracia extrema es la que tratan de vender los pseudogurús de la supuesta libertad financiera que bombardean las redes sociales. En estos tipejos solo veo a los bullies de toda la vida que tuve en el colegio y el instituto, que encima ahora han conseguido que la gente de la que abusan les pague para escuchar su discurso con tufo a secta.

“Puede parecer paradójico que los eslabones más débiles de la cadena alimentaria patriarcal se sientan más interpelados por un coach hipertrófico que les llama gordos y les insta a hacer burpees y a ser alfas en lugar de betas antes que por el feminismo, cuyo propósito de demolición patriarcal, sobre el papel, les libera de la exigencia de asumir roles supradominantes y competitivos. García-Mingo, sin embargo, no lo ve contradictorio. “Los insultos, los retos y las provocaciones forman parte de un código muy masculino de relacionarse. Cuando Amadeo Llados insulta a su audiencia, está haciendo el papel del entrenador deportivo o el mentor que busca sacar un diamante del barro. En el fondo, esos espectadores se sienten interpelados, y cuando te sientes interpelado, te sientes atendido, te sientes mirado, mientras que el relato feminista les hace sentirse ‘no mirados’, les hace sentirse invisibilizados”, dice la investigadora.”

Hace muy poco se ha descubierto una puerta trasera plantada en la nueva versión de xz utils, uno de los paquetes más básicos de open source presente en prácticamente cualquier distribución de linux y similares. Como profundiza este artículo, casi ha sido más un “confidence-trick” de ingeniería social desarrollado durante años, y que parece sacado de una película de espías.

Es inevitable pensar en Polyphia al escuchar este tema de los checos Grapefruit Astronauts, pero aun así creo que hacia al final logran ponerle su propio sabor a la pieza.