Politico reported on some new EU regulations which would restrict the exports of surveillance technologies by companies.
The update to EU rules, expected to be agreed within weeks, would set up a comprehensive EU list of technologies that governments can control through licensing. It would also increase due diligence obligations on companies to check if their goods can be used by their clients to violate human rights.
The Register reported on the announcement of Apple to introduce “privacy ’nutrition labels’” (https://web.archive.org/web/20201109184222/https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/06/apple_privacy_advice/):
“For food, you have nutrition labels; you can see if it’s packed with protein or loaded with sugar, or maybe both, all before you buy it,” he said. “So we thought it would be great to have something similar for apps. We’re going to require each developer to self-report their practices.”
Apparently there has been a challenge that was posed to designers to rethink visual for cybersecurity: “How might we reimagine a more compelling and relatable visual language for cybersecurity?”
Most of the images in this field are indeed overused, so it is quite interesting to alternatives these designers came with. Have a look at the top contributions here.
Artist Deborah Roberts created an interested series called Pluralism in which she collected names in a Microsoft Word document which are then marked as misspelled by the spell checker.
Have a look at the piece here (via Kottke.org).
Eva Modebadze wrote an interesting article in relation to the current protests for abortion rights in Poland. The following is a quote from her article on foucaultblog, in which she recaps the argument on the interlinkages between the construction of gender, sexuality and the nation state:
This article from The Financial Times titled “What the South Sea Company can teach us” explores the history book “Money For Nothing” by Thomas Levenson on The South Sea Bubble. From the following quote from the article, it seems that Levenson combines interesting perspectives on the history of science and economics:
In article from the Financial Time on how Big Tech can “best tackle conspiracy theories,” the author shares some interesting insights from research done by a group of ethnographers called Ethnographic Praxis in Context. Apparently these researchers observed that people who believe in conspiracy theories tend to “believe information that comes from scruffier, amateurish sites, since these seem more ‘authentic’”:
Member of the European Parliament Sofie in ’t Veld wrote an article on about:intel about the reliance on foreign and US technologies in EU domestic security, such as Palantir. Here’s a quote from her conclusions:
This article from The New Yorker discusses a Reddit forum where people post pictures of their fridge and others guess what kind of person they are.
Very interesting keynote by Tommaso Venturini at the iNovaMediaLab titled “What do we See when We look at Networks.” In his talk he remarks how networks have become the metaphor of connected complexity and explains how they should be a tool to make sense of this complexity.