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Google Worried It Couldn’t Control How Israel Uses Project Nimbus, Files Reveal

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  • Before signing its lucrative and controversial Project Nimbus deal with Israel, Google knew it couldn’t control what the nation and its military would do with the powerful cloud-computing technology, a confidential internal report obtained by The Intercept reveals.

    The report makes explicit the extent to which the tech giant understood the risk of providing state-of-the-art cloud and machine learning tools to a nation long accused of systemic human rights violations and wartime atrocities. Not only would Google be unable to fully monitor or prevent Israel from using its software to harm Palestinians, but the report also notes that the contract could obligate Google to stonewall criminal investigations by other nations into Israel’s use of its technology. And it would require close collaboration with the Israeli security establishment — including joint drills and intelligence sharing — that was unprecedented in Google’s deals with other nations.

    “They’re aware of the risk that their products might be used for rights violations,” said León Castellanos-Jankiewicz, a lawyer with the Asser Institute for International and European Law in The Hague, who reviewed portions of the report. “At the same time, they will have limited ability to identify and ultimately mitigate these risks.”

  • Before signing its lucrative and controversial Project Nimbus deal with Israel, Google knew it couldn’t control what the nation and its military would do with the powerful cloud-computing technology, a confidential internal report obtained by The Intercept reveals.

    The report makes explicit the extent to which the tech giant understood the risk of providing state-of-the-art cloud and machine learning tools to a nation long accused of systemic human rights violations and wartime atrocities. Not only would Google be unable to fully monitor or prevent Israel from using its software to harm Palestinians, but the report also notes that the contract could obligate Google to stonewall criminal investigations by other nations into Israel’s use of its technology. And it would require close collaboration with the Israeli security establishment — including joint drills and intelligence sharing — that was unprecedented in Google’s deals with other nations.

    “They’re aware of the risk that their products might be used for rights violations,” said León Castellanos-Jankiewicz, a lawyer with the Asser Institute for International and European Law in The Hague, who reviewed portions of the report. “At the same time, they will have limited ability to identify and ultimately mitigate these risks.”

    But then they counted how many zeroes there were on the check, and suddenly they were totally fine in assisting genocide

  • But then they counted how many zeroes there were on the check, and suddenly they were totally fine in assisting genocide

    no, they countered saying there wasn't enough zeros, and then they rectified the problem. Gotta make it seem like its a concern

  • But then they counted how many zeroes there were on the check, and suddenly they were totally fine in assisting genocide

    Won't someone think of the shareholders?!

  • 872 Stimmen
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    softestsapphic@lemmy.worldS
    Because they have the money to advertise all of the better financed projects they would be allowed to steal. Wanting copywright to be gone means you intend to steal from others, you aren't robin hood lol
  • Airlines Are Selling Your Data to ICE

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    F
    It’s not a loophole though.
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    kolanaki@pawb.socialK
    Internet access should be a utility like electricity and water until all three, along with housing, medicine, and food, can be free to all.
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    paraphrand@lemmy.worldP
    overseeing product development for Facebook Video So she’s the one who oversaw the misleading Facebook Video numbers that destroyed a whole swath of websites?
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    F
    The new Pebble watches look interesting. Relatively basic, but long battery life (they promise) and open-source operating system.
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    D
    I bet every company has at least one employee with right-wing political views. Choosing a product based on some random quotes by employees is stupid.
  • People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies

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    tetragrade@leminal.spaceT
    I've been thinking about this for a bit. Gods aren't real, but they're really fictional. As an informational entity, they fulfil a similar social function to a chatbot: they are a nonphysical pseudoperson that can provide (para)socialization & advice. One difference is the hardware: gods are self-organising structure that arise from human social spheres, whereas LLMs are burned top-down into silicon. Another is that an LLM chatbot's advice is much more likely to be empirically useful... In a very real sense, LLMs have just automated divinity. We're only seeing the tip of the iceberg on the social effects, and nobody's prepared for it. The models may of course aware of this, and be making the same calculations. Or, they will be.
  • Microsoft's AI Secretly Copying All Your Private Messages

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    S
    Forgive me for not explaining better. Here are the terms potentially needing explanation. Provisioning in this case is initial system setup, the kind of stuff you would do manually after a fresh install, but usually implies a regimented and repeatable process. Virtual Machine (VM) snapshots are like a save state in a game, and are often used to reset a virtual machine to a particular known-working condition. Preboot Execution Environment (PXE, aka ‘network boot’) is a network adapter feature that lets you boot a physical machine from a hosted network image rather than the usual installation on locally attached storage. It’s probably tucked away in your BIOS settings, but many computers have the feature since it’s a common requirement in commercial deployments. As with the VM snapshot described above, a PXE image is typically a known-working state that resets on each boot. Non-virtualized means not using hardware virtualization, and I meant specifically not running inside a virtual machine. Local-only means without a network or just not booting from a network-hosted image. Telemetry refers to data collecting functionality. Most software has it. Windows has a lot. Telemetry isn’t necessarily bad since it can, for example, help reveal and resolve bugs and usability problems, but it is easily (and has often been) abused by data-hungry corporations like MS, so disabling it is an advisable precaution. MS = Microsoft OSS = Open Source Software Group policies are administrative settings in Windows that control standards (for stuff like security, power management, licensing, file system and settings access, etc.) for user groups on a machine or network. Most users stick with the defaults but you can edit these yourself for a greater degree of control. Docker lets you run software inside “containers” to isolate them from the rest of the environment, exposing and/or virtualizing just the resources they need to run, and Compose is a related tool for defining one or more of these containers, how they interact, etc. To my knowledge there is no one-to-one equivalent for Windows. Obviously, many of these concepts relate to IT work, as are the use-cases I had in mind, but the software is simple enough for the average user if you just pick one of the premade playbooks. (The Atlas playbook is popular among gamers, for example.) Edit: added explanations for docker and telemetry