We had a great time hosting this week’s Lunch & Liberty on X Spaces, where we discussed technology and liberty with our amazing guests Jim Pfaff and Sean Tario. If you missed it live, you can LISTEN to it here:
Daring Bits
Google Abandons Open Internet for Unconstitutional Regulations - Google, having benefited from the open internet, is now advocating for regulations that mirror California’s unconstitutional Age Appropriate Design Code. Such regulations would burden smaller competitors under the guise of saving the children. Do you like giant corporations? Thank a regulator.
U.S. Treasury Seeks Targets Crypto Mixers - The U.S. Department of the Treasury wants to designate crypto mixers as a “primary money laundering concern,” also citing concerns about terrorism (which means they really super want you to hate mixers too). Cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, offer transparency through a public blockchain, but this can compromise user privacy. Crypto mixers enhance privacy by blending users’ coins, making transaction trails hard to trace - and, incidentally, making crypto assets harder for government to steal tax.
Supreme Court Lifts Biden’s Social Media Restrictions - The U.S. Supreme Court blocked a lower court’s decision restricting the Biden administration from communicating with social media companies about contentious content. Conservative justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch expressed concern in a dissent, stating, “what the court has done, I fear, will be seen by some as giving the government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views.” The Supreme Court has agreed to immediately take up the government’s appeal, meaning it will issue a ruling in its current term, which runs until the end of June.
Global Encryption Coalition Speaks Up For Encryption - At the 2023 Internet Governance Forum, the Global Encryption Coalition - a coalition of human rights activists, business interests, and cryptography experts - opposed global governmental initiatives seeking to curtail end-to-end encryption (E2EE), citing its essential role in protecting privacy, security, and human rights. The coalition argued that undermining E2EE, whether through backdoors or client-side scanning, would make the world more dangerous, jeopardizing not only personal privacy and freedom of expression, but also national security, journalism, and the protection of minors. Hear Hear!
Write Useless Software - This delightful little blog encourages devs to write more “useless” software, emphasizing that play and exploration in computing can reignite the joy of programming and counter the monotony of always creating utilitarian products. Such projects, even if not conventionally useful, offer valuable learning experiences and the freedom to experiment without the pressures of typical work constraints.
Version Museaum - Remember what the Google website used to look like? How about Facebook or Amazon? You will.
Robot Overlords
Artists Fight AI With Data Poisoning - A new tool allows artists to subtly modify their digital artwork in ways undetectable to the human eye but which cause AI models to malfunction if the art is used in their training without permission. This aims to deter AI companies from using copyrighted art without consent.
AI Neural Network Thinks Like a Human - Researchers have trained a neural network to demonstrate “systematic compositionality,” the ability to combine known concepts in novel ways, mirroring a distinctly human aspect of intelligence and challenging previous cognitive science assumptions.
Eureka: Human-Level Reward Design via Coding Large Language Models - Eureka utilizes GPT-4 to autonomously design reward functions for robot dexterity tasks, achieving superhuman performance in cool tasks like pen spinning, and significantly outperforming human-engineered rewards, thus presenting a promising approach for complex skill acquisition. Plus, it’s open source, which we always like. Research.GitHub.
Elixir Meets GPT-2 - Bumblebee, an Elixir library, simplifies the implementation of powerful models by abstracting model-building details. This article demonstrates how to manually implement the GPT-2 model in pure Nx, an Elixir numerical computing library, emphasizing the benefits of Bumblebee’s abstractions and showcasing the application of Nx for scalable machine learning inference.
Liberty Toolbox
OpenNIC Project - OpenNIC offers an open, democratic alternative DNS root that combats censorship, ensures DNS neutrality, and prevents DNS hijacking by ISPs, providing free access to unique top-level domains and multiple namespaces, all while remaining financially uncorrupted as a volunteer-operated non-profit.
Libre Silicon - Libre Silicon aims to democratize the semiconductor industry by offering an open-source semiconductor manufacturing process standard, allowing SMEs, startups, and hobbyists to develop and manufacture their own ASICs affordably and transparently, thereby breaking the monopoly held by major proprietary manufacturers and increasing trust and security in chip design through full transparency and auditability. Discussion.
https://github.com/orbitdb/orbitdb - OrbitDB is a serverless, peer-to-peer database utilizing IPFS for data storage and Libp2p Pubsub for syncing, designed for decentralized apps with features like various data models and a cryptographic operation-based CRDT system, compatible across browsers, Node.js, and multiple operating systems.
