JRepin

Element Call is an open source end-to-end encrypted video and voice conferencing solution built on the Matrix protocol for secure communication.

We’re developing Element Call to provide the best possible security properties with compulsory end-to-end encryption, supporting sender verification, forward secrecy, post-compromise secrecy, zero-trust decentralisation and cross-domain capability. It achieves this by building on the foundations of Matrix as a mature, audited [1], open standard protocol for secure communication.

This release updates the Caret Browsing mode to also work in the PDF viewer and adds support for the Screen Wake Lock API.

While the crowd at sxsw2024 booing a sizzle reel of people either promising the beauty of the future “AI” will bring or claiming it to be “without alternative” is funny and went viral for all the right reasons, this event speaks to a deeper shift in perception.

As Brian Merchant writes:

For the buzziest tech of the moment to get shouted down at SXSW speaks volumes about the scale and nature of the animosity generative AI has amassed. The tech is seen, here, as exploitative by tastemakers and by technologists.

But I’d go further: It’s not just the public perception that OpenAI has been trying to plant in our collective understanding is falling apart due to the actions of that strange company, I think the actual narrative of “AI” is untangling.

It’s official — the Pentagon is becoming a bank. Well, sort of. At a March 8th event on dual-use technology at SXSW in Austin, Texas, director of the Office of Strategic Capital Jason Rathje announced that his team has officially received the internal authority to grant executive loans and loan guarantees, a first within the Pentagon.

The Office of Strategic Capital, or OSC, was created in response to growing concern over China’s investment in next-generation technology. According to its investment strategy, released Friday, March 8th, the OSC will invest in firms researching and developing 14 “critical technologies,” including hypersonics, quantum computing, microelectronics, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence.

There's an extraordinary amount of hype around "AI" right now, perhaps even greater than in past cycles, where we've seen an AI bubble about once per decade. This time, the focus is on generative systems, particularly LLMs and other tools designed to generate plausible outputs that either make people feel like the response is correct, or where the response is sufficient to fill in for domains where correctness doesn't matter.

But we can tell the traditional tech industry (the handful of giant tech companies, along with startups backed by the handful of most powerful venture capital firms) is in the midst of building another "Web3"-style froth bubble because they've again abandoned one of the core values of actual technology-based advancement: reason.

Audiences attending the SXSW premiere of "The Fall Guy," starring Ryan Gosling, were not happy about having to watch a sizzle reel before the movie that touted the promises of AI.

Since the buzzword “artificial intelligence” was coined in the 1950s, AI has gone through several boom and bust cycles.

A new technological approach looks interesting and gets a few results. It gets ridiculously hyped up and lands funding. The tech turns out to be not so great, so the funding gets cut. The down cycles are called AI winters.

Apple’s battle with Epic is a reminder that today’s tech companies behave like 19th-century monopolists. Installing democratic control over these modern throwbacks to Gilded Age robber barons is the only way to curb their power.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13035348

Following its investigation, the EDPS has found that the European Commission (Commission) has infringed several key data protection rules when using Microsoft 365. In its decision, the EDPS imposes corrective measures on the Commission.

The EDPS has found that the Commission has infringed several provisions of Regulation (EU) 2018/1725, the EU’s data protection law for EU institutions, bodies, offices and agencies (EUIs), including those on transfers of personal data outside the EU/European Economic Area (EEA).

In 1914, on the eve of the First World War, HG Wells published a novel about the possibilities of an even greater conflagration. The World Set Free imagines, 30 years before the Manhattan Project, the creation of atomic weapons that allow “a man [to] carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city”. Global war breaks out, leading to an atomic apocalypse. It takes the “establishment of a world government” to bring about peace.

What concerned Wells was not simply the perils of a new technology, it was also the dangers of democracy. Wells’ world government was not created through democratic will but imposed as a benign dictatorship. “The governed will show their consent by silence,” England’s King Egbert menacingly remarks. For Wells, the “common man” was “a violent fool in social and public affairs”. Only an educated, scientifically minded elite could “save democracy from itself”.

One of the defining economic challenges of our time is how to distribute the value generated by groundbreaking technologies, such as generative artificial intelligence and recent innovations in biomedicine and manufacturing. To improve living standards, the benefits of transformative technologies must be widely shared. So far, however, these benefits have been monopolised by a small cadre of tech billionaires.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/12896912

As the EU’s new flagship tech laws, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, are coming into full application, Big Tech is working hard to shoot them down. As of today, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) becomes fully applicable, following its counterpart the Digital Services Act (DSA) on 17 February.

However, as the EU’s new tech laws are coming into full application, tech corporations like Apple, Amazon, Meta and TikTok are already undermining them at every turn. To subvert these new regulations, tech corporations have filed a number of lawsuits against the European Commission and attempted to weaken the rules with malicious compliance that protects their profits at the expense of their users.