#Trust and transparency

[ericartem]

The Path to Human-AI Harmony (or Partnership)

Content 18+ In the annals of human history, few topics have elicited as much apprehension and speculation as the rise of artificial intelligence. The specter of sentient machines, endowed with intellects surpassing our own, haunts our collective consciousness, conjuring visions of dystopian futures and existential threats. Yet, amidst this pervasive sense of unease, there exists a beacon of hope,…

[march10]

Every relationship is unique, and what matters most is how you and your girlfriend navigate this situation together. Honest communication, trust, and mutual understanding can help address any concerns and find a resolution that works for both of you.

[xyrali]

Now, die.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Palantir’s NHS-stealing Big Lie

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

Capitalism's Big Lie in four words: "There is no alternative." Looters use this lie for cover, insisting that they're hard-nosed grownups living in the reality of human nature, incentives, and facts (which don't care about your feelings).

The point of "there is no alternative" is to extinguish the innovative imagination. "There is no alternative" is really "stop trying to think of alternatives, dammit." But there are always alternatives, and the only reason to demand that they be excluded from consideration is that these alternatives are manifestly superior to the looter's supposed inevitability.

Right now, there's an attempt underway to loot the NHS, the UK's single most beloved institution. The NHS has been under sustained assault for decades – budget cuts, overt and stealth privatisation, etc. But one of its crown jewels has been stubbournly resistant to being auctioned off: patient data. Not that HMG hasn't repeatedly tried to flog patient data – it's just that the public won't stand for it:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/21/nhs-data-platform-may-be-undermined-by-lack-of-public-trust-warn-campaigners

Patients – quite reasonably – do not trust the private sector to handle their sensitive medical records.

Now, this presents a real conundrum, because NHS patient data, taken as a whole, holds untold medical insights. The UK is a large and diverse country and those records in aggregate can help researchers understand the efficacy of various medicines and other interventions. Leaving that data inert and unanalysed will cost lives: in the UK, and all over the world.

For years, the stock answer to "how do we do science on NHS records without violating patient privacy?" has been "just anonymise the data." The claim is that if you replace patient names with random numbers, you can release the data to research partners without compromising patient privacy, because no one will be able to turn those numbers back into names.

It would be great if this were true, but it isn't. In theory and in practice, it is surprisingly easy to "re-identify" individuals in anonymous data-sets. To take an obvious example: we know which two dates former PM Tony Blair was given a specific treatment for a cardiac emergency, because this happened while he was in office. We also know Blair's date of birth. Check any trove of NHS data that records a person who matches those three facts and you've found Tony Blair – and all the private data contained alongside those public facts is now in the public domain, forever.

Not everyone has Tony Blair's reidentification hooks, but everyone has data in some kind of database, and those databases are continually being breached, leaked or intentionally released. A breach from a taxi service like Addison-Lee or Uber, or from Transport for London, will reveal the journeys that immediately preceded each prescription at each clinic or hospital in an "anonymous" NHS dataset, which can then be cross-referenced to databases of home addresses and workplaces. In an eyeblink, millions of Britons' records of receiving treatment for STIs or cancer can be connected with named individuals – again, forever.

Re-identification attacks are now considered inevitable; security researchers have made a sport out of seeing how little additional information they need to re-identify individuals in anonymised data-sets. A surprising number of people in any large data-set can be re-identified based on a single characteristic in the data-set.

Given all this, anonymous NHS data releases should have been ruled out years ago. Instead, NHS records are to be handed over to the US military surveillance company Palantir, a notorious human-rights abuser and supplier to the world's most disgusting authoritarian regimes. Palantir – founded by the far-right Trump bagman Peter Thiel – takes its name from the evil wizard Sauron's all-seeing orb in Lord of the Rings ("Sauron, are we the baddies?"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership

The argument for turning over Britons' most sensitive personal data to an offshore war-crimes company is "there is no alternative." The UK needs the medical insights in those NHS records, and this is the only way to get at them.

As with every instance of "there is no alternative," this turns out to be a lie. What's more, the alternative is vastly superior to this chumocratic sell-out, was Made in Britain, and is the envy of medical researchers the world 'round. That alternative is "trusted research environments." In a new article for the Good Law Project, I describe these nigh-miraculous tools for privacy-preserving, best-of-breed medical research:

https://goodlawproject.org/cory-doctorow-health-data-it-isnt-just-palantir-or-bust/

At the outset of the covid pandemic Oxford's Ben Goldacre and his colleagues set out to perform realtime analysis of the data flooding into NHS trusts up and down the country, in order to learn more about this new disease. To do so, they created Opensafely, an open-source database that was tied into each NHS trust's own patient record systems:

https://timharford.com/2022/07/how-to-save-more-lives-and-avoid-a-privacy-apocalypse/

Opensafely has its own database query language, built on SQL, but tailored to medical research. Researchers write programs in this language to extract aggregate data from each NHS trust's servers, posing medical questions of the data without ever directly touching it. These programs are published in advance on a git server, and are preflighted on synthetic NHS data on a test server. Once the program is approved, it is sent to the main Opensafely server, which then farms out parts of the query to each NHS trust, packages up the results, and publishes them to a public repository.

This is better than "the best of both worlds." This public scientific process, with peer review and disclosure built in, allows for frequent, complex analysis of NHS data without giving a single third party access to a a single patient record, ever. Opensafely was wildly successful: in just months, Opensafely collaborators published sixty blockbuster papers in Nature – science that shaped the world's response to the pandemic.

Opensafely was so successful that the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care commissioned a review of the programme with an eye to expanding it to serve as the nation's default way of conducting research on medical data:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis/better-broader-safer-using-health-data-for-research-and-analysis

This approach is cheaper, safer, and more effective than handing hundreds of millions of pounds to Palantir and hoping they will manage the impossible: anonymising data well enough that it is never re-identified. Trusted Research Environments have been endorsed by national associations of doctors and researchers as the superior alternative to giving the NHS's data to Peter Thiel or any other sharp operator seeking a public contract.

As a lifelong privacy campaigner, I find this approach nothing short of inspiring. I would love for there to be a way for publishers and researchers to glean privacy-preserving insights from public library checkouts (such a system would prove an important counter to Amazon's proprietary god's-eye view of reading habits); or BBC podcasts or streaming video viewership.

You see, there is an alternative. We don't have to choose between science and privacy, or the public interest and private gain. There's always an alternative – if there wasn't, the other side wouldn't have to continuously repeat the lie that no alternative is possible.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/08/the-fire-of-orodruin/#are-we-the-baddies

Image: Gage Skidmore (modified) https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_Thiel_(51876933345).jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[defibrillism]

going back to sleep now but like wow the way you talk about ford totally doesn't reflect your opinions on irl abuse victims or anything. i just saw someone call ford stupid because "nobody else would fall for bill's manipulation! ford is just that self-centered!" like. you may want to examine the message you're sending there 😁👍

[alwaysbewoke]

the fix is in!!

[emotional-engine]

In case you missed - GREAT Neopets News!

I didn't see anybody talking about the news here, so I thought that I could share a summary.

The Neopets Team announced today that they're under new management. They're no longer affiliated with Jumpstart (which announced their closure back in June) or their parent company NetDragon.

In their blog post in the official Neopets Medium page, they confirm that they are now an independent company:

(Dominc Law, worked for NetDragon and was an old school Neopets player. He put together a team to work on saving the brand.)

Also in that blog post the team talks about how they are well aware of the problems the site has been through in the last decade, they acknowledge the lack of resources which resulted in the Neopets website being left broken.

Going ahead, they are going to focus on community requests, such as speeding up the process of Flash Games conversion, clearing up the page conversion backlog, bug fixes, mobile compatibility issues and improving customer support.

Most importantly, in my opinion, they clear up that they WILL NOT go forward with any Metaverse bullshit, and will instead work on creating a game that feels like Neopets:

At this point, they have secured $4M in funding from various (unnamed) investors with additional funding from the management buyout. For the first time in forever, it looks like TNT has the resources they need to move the brand forward. In the blog post, they mention they have already hired developers and artists to work on the fixes the site needs.

From what it looks like, the game will be a mobile social life-simulation, parallel to the current website. We don’t have to worry that neopets.com will be replaced by a mobile app.

As of now, they have announced:

A brand new plot, scheduled for early 2024

A 2 million(!) NeoCash giveaway

More transparency with monthly updates from the team, scheduled AMAs

Neopets will be under the control of a new, unified entity: World of Neopia, Inc - the website will remain the same (neopets.com)

A Brand Ambassador Program

No longer going forward with NFT/Metaverse stuff

At the end, they published a FAQ with some answers that I found to be good and very interesting:

You can read the entire blog post here.

Or watch the YouTube announcement (which is way shorter):

[r0semultiverse]

The Edge of Sleep was and still is on the top 10. The problem is that not everyone can run it in the background constantly or wants to rewatch it as we approach the 18th. What exactly does “it just needs to reach the top 10” mean? It did that already. I think we are due for an update with more transparency if the NDA allows or if Amazon communicated that at all.

[in-tenebris-et-in-solitudine]

[nyikondlovu]

Chefs Kiss (Sydcarmy) fans stay with me, Chefs!

I’m not taking anything Ayo, Jeremy and Christopher say against sydcarmy, aka Chefs Kiss, seriously.

They purposefully kept Carmen and Sydney as separate as possible this season, which is a big mistake in my opinion.

The show is about the characters and their relationships with each other. Food is a part of it, but it’s mostly the relationship each character has with one another that makes the show.

The writers trying to dispel the rumours by keeping what I would call our male and female leads apart is nuts because Jeremy and Ayo play so well off of each other but by separating them Jeremy gave his weakest acting (which is still very good) during Carmy/Claire scenes?

They keep saying The Bear doesn’t need romance then give Carmen a whole relationship that was so boring to watch for like 7 episodes and felt like watching paint dry because Claire isn’t engaging.

I’m expected to care about her, what she supposedly means to Carmen and hear about how great she is but don’t get to see it? She’s an ER resident for gods sake and she’s running around town giggling every 5 minutes without a semblance of the hard work and exhaustion that comes with being a doctor.

And for the reason stated above, I believe she’s a manic pixie dream girl. She’s there to change Carmen’s view on life, be different and quirky and the one who got away when in reality Carmy forgot who she was and had to be reminded which took him a whole 5 seconds to remember the supposed love of his life, purposefully gives her the wrong number and she says “You’re the Bear, of course I remember.”

No one was gonna take her seriously as the person to keep up with Carmy and help keep him sane.

Meanwhile Sydney does. She anchors him, she keeps up with him and she calls him out on his shit. Sydney isn’t perfect. She’s terrible at stating what she needs at that moment, she slightly short tempered and she is passive aggressive.

She also is working on her impatience and passive aggression. She eventually tells Carmy she needs his attention as her partner. She speaks up for herself to her dad and she’s not letting her ambition be treated like a bad thing anymore.

Carmen and Sydney would make sense because they are flawed. Carmy stops going to group therapy as soon as he starts dating Claire because she’s ‘fixed’ him and they don’t work because of that.

Sydney has ‘levelled up’ in her professional life, she’s more assertive and willing to listen and has just grown as a person and that type of continuous strive for self growth is what Carmen needs to see in order to do the same HIMSELF.

Sydney isn’t there to fix Carmy, she’s someone who he can grow alongside.

Claire was used as a kids bandaid to a gaping wound; the wound being Michael. Claire represents a life where Mikey was alive and Carm’s fucked up family was as whole and happy as it’s gonna be. She represents the past and everyone PUSHED him to want to date her in the past.

There is too much between our two chefs for simply business partners:

S1 shows Carmen scrubbing the floor of the restaurant when in turmoil while Sydney does the same in S2;

She’s spliced into the montage of Carmy and Claire as though she’s a silent part of their relationship;

She has the three dagger heart tattoo which typically represents romantic heartbreak and turbulence;

Carmen remembers her interest in his whites from three months prior even though she didn’t say anything and gets her her own custom whites;

The imagery from their conversation under the table? Him asking her to screw the other side and “say more, please” as he holds up the table (and Sydney) while she finally shares her fears;

“You’re not alone.” “Neither are you.”;

The memories of Sydney being what calms him from his panic attack;

During said panic attack, the song that was Claire and Carmen’s plays in reverse and any flashes of her are accompanied by memories of his dysfunctional family while the moment he thinks of Sydney? The song starts playing correctly. He calms and flashes of his family (and Claire) disappear;

Them constantly cooling an argument with the ‘I’m sorry’ gesture;

Him constantly being in tune with her emotions and body language.

Sydney represents a new beginning. The chance to build a healthy family with the staff of The Bear, Sydney, Natalie and Richie. She represents a future. She represents good change.

I’m fully convinced Ayo and Jeremy are just doing what all actors do with a ship that’s not yet canon: downplaying or dismissing it.

C’mon if you’ve been in The High School Musical The Musical The Series fandom and shipped Rina from the beginning, you know how it feels to be persecuted and gaslit by other fans and the actors for seasons.

TL:DR, Chefs Kiss is literally a super slow burn and no one of the team will confirm it until it actually happens.

Also, never let your girlfriend (Claire) stop you (Carmen) from opening a restaurant with the love of your life (Sydney)

And if you think they should “stay platonic”, ask yourself WHY every swirl ship with a white male lead and black female is hated by fandoms and the argument is “they’re best friends” or “they’re like siblings”. WHY can’t black women be desired? Because you can’t self insert? Check yourself before claiming a character who was so underwhelming I skipped so many scenes is a better match than the character who has seen him at his worst and told him he cannot and will not talk to her like that. The first person he thought to open a restaurant, that means so much to him, with

[livelylambs]

On the topic of homoerotic rivalry I’d like to throw my hat into the ring and say that it’s cool! But what if sometimes it’s. Not homoerotic. Like, what if it’s not about the repression of attraction and how it manifests itself in the bickering and the fights and the vitriol. What if it’s exclusively the moments where, against all odds, they find themselves laughing together through the cracks of the facade. Where the mask of the rivalry crumbles and they find themselves doing something as vulnerable as enjoying themselves, without restriction, without judgment, with someone who seemed just as far away as they did. Maybe it’s about how vital it is for such intensely defined individuals, who are so unwilling to sacrifice any part of their personal freedom, to know they can be safe and soft in company when they want it. And that like, somehow, it’s the same individualism that makes them bicker that ultimately allows them to respect the other’s freedom more than anyone else. And it’s not about the attraction it’s just about the vulnerability and the trust and the independence and they wonder if they might be able to live their whole lives like this, adjacent to one another. Free, but with the capacity to let their guard down and still be welcomed in again. You ever think about that

[ducktollers]

wip

[mamawasatesttube]

like. okay. thinking about this some more and tbh it is kind of insane to me the way people will sometimes characterise core four, and kon specifically, as being completely unconditionally on board with tim not revealing his real name or face to them prior to wwyj.

like, i know the real reason is that the people doing this simply don't read comics. which is such a fucking wall to run into. but man... tim not telling them his identity when everyone else had revealed theirs to each other/didn't have one to begin with was the biggest driving force behind the tim and kon fight on apokalips. the same way kon was upset and hurt that superman never told him he's also clark kent. kon is very explicitly not cool with being left out of the loop about things as big as secret identities. it makes him feel like the other person doesn't consider him trustworthy, and then he starts questioning their relationship. (once again, pointing at the kon & lois conversation post hypertime arc when he finds out clark's secret identity.)

i love identity shenanigans. i love identity angst. i think thats one of the most fun things about the superhero genre! and aus where they don't know each other's ids can be fun!!! but it's like. INCREDIBLY out of character for that not to be a driving force of conflict if kon is involved in any way.

[starfilledsea]

girl help i’m going insane thinking about iwtv and black sails parallels. everything is a story you can’t trust anyone’s words. memory is a monster it remembers you don’t. a story is true a story is untrue as time extends it matters less and less. there is no corroboration of louis and armand’s stories about claudia in season 2, the same way there is no corroboration of silver’s story of what happened to flint. can we trust armand’s story of how she died? can we trust silver’s story of how flint didn’t die? will we ever know the truth? is there such a thing as the truth? was it raining louis?

[backfromtwitterforw]

There's legal silence where you keep sensitive information to yourself. And there's silence where you don't even say "please be patient we'll update you in time, we're actually talking to the union/the admins/the intern team". For us viewers, we don't need to know more than to have the assurance that things are being taking care of. We don't need to be repeated the exact same info I différent words over and over again.

There's silence with your team where you want to be careful with your wording. And there's silence with your team where you keep them completely in the dark about their future, not even saying what they just need to hear: "sorry about how things turned out, we have no certainty in either taking you back or not, right now our priority is financial stability, we cannot tell you our différent options so far, but we'll update you when and if we can afford to take you back".

There's silence where you ask for discretion because you will not be able to keep that many people in the team and don't want leaks about what branches are kept and which one will close, then announcing to a whole group of admins that they'll be let out of the project starting this or this day. And there's silence where you warn a lot of twitter update admins that they won't be in the project starting immediately through discord and closing said discours before everyone had even a chance to read it.

There's silence where you're afraid of leaks and there's silence where you don't treat people working for you with respect.

[poorly-drawn-monhun]

These mushrooms will be great for a potion!

(In case the effect doesnt work)