California Passes Bill Requiring Easier Data Sharing Opt Outs

Most of the attention today has been focused on California’s controversial “kill switch” AI safety bill, which passed the California State Assembly by a 45-11 vote. However, California legislators passed another tech bill this week which requires internet browsers and mobile operating systems to offer a simple tool for consumers to easily opt out of data sharing and selling for targeted advertising. Slashdot reader awwshit shares a report from The Record: The state’s Senate passed the landmark legislation after the General Assembly approved it late Wednesday. The Senate then added amendments to the bill which now goes back to the Assembly for final sign off before it is sent to the governor’s desk, a process Matt Schwartz, a policy analyst at Consumer Reports, called a “formality.” California, long a bellwether for privacy regulation, now sets an example for other states which could offer the same protections and in doing so dramatically disrupt the online advertising ecosystem, according to Schwartz.

“If folks use it, [the new tool] could severely impact businesses that make their revenue from monetizing consumers’ data,” Schwartz said in an interview with Recorded Future News. “You could go from relatively small numbers of individuals taking advantage of this right now to potentially millions and that’s going to have a big impact.” As it stands, many Californians don’t know they have the right to opt out because the option is invisible on their browsers, a fact which Schwartz said has “artificially suppressed” the existing regulation’s intended effects. “It shouldn’t be that hard to send the universal opt out signal,” Schwartz added. “This will require [browsers and mobile operating systems] to make that setting easy to use and find.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

South Korea Faces Deepfake Porn ‘Emergency’

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: South Korea’s president has urged authorities to do more to “eradicate” the country’s digital sex crime epidemic, amid a flood of deepfake pornography targeting young women. Authorities, journalists and social media users recently identified a large number of chat groups where members were creating and sharing sexually explicit “deepfake” images — including some of underage girls. Deepfakes are generated using artificial intelligence, and often combine the face of a real person with a fake body. South Korea’s media regulator is holding an emergency meeting in the wake of the discoveries.

The spate of chat groups, linked to individual schools and universities across the country, were discovered on the social media app Telegram over the past week. Users, mainly teenage students, would upload photos of people they knew — both classmates and teachers — and other users would then turn them into sexually explicit deepfake images. The discoveries follow the arrest of the Russian-born founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, on Saturday, after it was alleged that child pornography, drug trafficking and fraud were taking place on the encrypted messaging app. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday instructed authorities to “thoroughly investigate and address these digital sex crimes to eradicate them.”

“Recently, deepfake videos targeting an unspecified number of people have been circulating rapidly on social media,” President Yoon said at a cabinet meeting. “The victims are often minors and the perpetrators are mostly teenagers.” To build a “healthy media culture,” President Yoon said young men needed to be better educated. “Although it is often dismissed as ‘just a prank,’ it is clearly a criminal act that exploits technology to hide behind the shield of anonymity,” he said.

The Guardian notes that making sexually explicit deepfakes with the intention of distributing them is punishable by five years in prison or a fine of $37,500.

Further reading: 1 in 10 Minors Say Their Friends Use AI to Generate Nudes of Other Kids, Survey Finds (Source: 404 Media)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Backpage.com Founder Michael Lacey Sentenced To 5 Years In Prison, Fined $3 Million

Three former Backpage executives, including co-founder Michael Lacey, were sentenced to prison for promoting prostitution and laundering money while disguising their activities as a legitimate classified business. The Associated Press reports: A jury convicted Lacey, 76, of a single count of international concealment money laundering last year, but deadlocked on 84 other prostitution facilitation and money laundering charges. U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa later acquitted Lacey of dozens of charges for insufficient evidence, but he still faces about 30 prostitution facilitation and money laundering charges. Authorities say the site generated $500 million in prostitution-related revenue from its inception in 2004 until it was shut down by the government in 2018.

Lacey’s lawyers say their client was focused on running an alternative newspaper chain and wasn’t involved in day-to-day operations of Backpage. But Humetewa told Lacey during Wednesday’s sentencing he was aware of the allegations against Backpage and did nothing. “In the face of all this, you held fast,” Humetewa said. “You didn’t do a thing.” Two other Backpage executives, Chief Financial Officer John Brunst and Executive Vice President Scott Spear, also were convicted last year and were each sentenced on Wednesday to 10 years in prison. The judge ordered Lacey and the two executives to report to the U.S. Marshals Service in two weeks to start serving their sentences.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

‘Uncertainty’ Drives LinkedIn To Migrate From CentOS To Azure Linux

The Register’s Liam Proven reports: Microsoft’s in-house professional networking site is moving to Microsoft’s in-house Linux. This could mean that big changes are coming for the former CBL-Mariner distro. Ievgen Priadka’s post on the LinkedIn Engineering blog, titled Navigating the transition: adopting Azure Linux as LinkedIn’s operating system, is the visible sign of what we suspect has been a massive internal engineering effort. It describes some of the changes needed to migrate what the post calls “most of our fleet” from the end-of-life CentOS 7 to Microsoft Azure Linux — the distro that grew out of and replaced its previous internal distro, CBL-Mariner.

This is an important stage in a long process. Microsoft acquired LinkedIn way back in 2016. Even so, as recently as the end of last year, we reported that a move to Azure had been abandoned, which came a few months after it laid off almost 700 LinkedIn staff — the majority in R&D. The blog post is over 3,500 words long, so there’s quite a lot to chew on — and we’re certain that this has been passed through and approved by numerous marketing and management people and scoured of any potentially embarrassing admissions. Some interesting nuggets remain, though. We enjoyed the modest comment that: “However, with the shift to CentOS Stream, users felt uncertain about the project’s direction and the timeline for updates. This uncertainty created some concerns about the reliability and support of CentOS as an operating system.” […]

There are some interesting technical details in the post too. It seems LinkedIn is running on XFS — also the RHEL default file system, of course — with the notable exception of Hadoop, and so the Azure Linux team had to add XFS support. Some CentOS and actual RHEL is still used in there somewhere. That fits perfectly with using any of the RHELatives. However, the post also mentions that the team developed a tool to aid with deploying via MaaS, which it explicitly defines as Metal as a Service. MaaS is a Canonical service, although it does support other distros — so as well as CentOS, there may have been some Ubuntu in the LinkedIn stack as well. Some details hint at what we suspect were probably major deployment headaches. […] Some of the other information covers things the teams did not do, which is equally informative. […]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Caltech’s Latest STEM Breakthrough: Most of Its New Students Are Women

Bruce66423 shares a report from the Los Angeles Times: In a milestone breakthrough, more than half of Caltech’s incoming undergraduate class this fall will be women (source paywalled; alternative source) for the first time in its 133-year history. The class of 113 women and 109 men comes 50 years after Caltech graduated its first class of undergraduate women, who were admitted in 1970. “What this means for young women is that we are a place that can be representative of them and their experiences … where they can grow and thrive and excel and become really impressive, extraordinary scientists and engineers and go on to make a difference in this really research-heavy profession,” said Ashley Pallie, dean of admissions

Gloria L. Blackwell, chief executive of the American Assn. of University Women, lauded Caltech’s achievement as critical progress in reducing the substantial gap of women in science, technology, engineering and math. Although women hold about 60% of degrees in biological sciences, they represent only about 18% in computer science and 20% in engineering, Blackwell said. Research has shown that boys are not better at math and science than girls, but a persistent message in society says otherwise — and especially discourages Latinas and Black girls from pursuing the fields because they face discrimination and have less access to role models, resources and opportunities, the AAUW says. The report notes that Caltech isn’t the first educational institution to reach gender parity in STEM. Harvey Mudd College, a small private institution in Claremont, “enrolled more women than men in 2010 for the first time in its history and in 2014 graduated more women than men in engineering,” reports the LA Times. “Today, women make up 52.8% of majors in computer science, 50.5% in engineering and 68.2% in mathematical and computational biology.”

UC Berkeley is another powerful producer of STEM graduates, with “nearly half of students majoring in those fields [identifying] as women or nonbinary.” However, the report notes that the field they enter varies significantly. “They make up more than two-thirds of students in biological and biomedical sciences, but about one-third in engineering, computer and informational sciences, and mathematics and statistics.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.