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Tuesday, March 22, 2022

‘For the first time in history anyone can join a war’: Volunteers join Russia-Ukraine cyber fight

 Fact-Checking Network (IFCN)


Drawing the Line: What to Do with the Work of Immoral Artists from Museums to the Movies by Erich Hatala Matthes is reviewed by Andy Lamey at The Star


‘For the first time in history anyone can join a war’: Volunteers join Russia-Ukraine cyber fight


DeepMind AI tool helps historians restore ancient texts

The Register: “AI software can help historians interpret and date ancient texts by reconstructing works destroyed over time, according to a new paper published in Nature. A team of computer scientists and experts in classical studies led by DeepMind and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice trained a transformer-based neural network to restore inscriptions written in ancient Greek between 7th century BC and 5th century AD. The model, named “Ithaca” after the home of legendary Greek king Odysseus, can also estimate when the text was written and where it might have originated. By recovering fragments of text on broken pieces of pottery or blurry scripts, for example, researchers can begin translating them and learn more about ancient civilizations. Thea Sommerschield, co-author of the paper and an epigrapher of ancient Greek and Roman, told The Register in a joint statement with co-author and DeepMind scientist Yannis Assael that inscriptions are vital records. Everything from religious calendars to laws and leases can be preserved…”


Pete Recommends Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, March 12, 2022 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: 2022 Guide to Internet Privacy Resources and Tools; Russia creates its own TLS certificate authority to bypass sanctions; Twitter quietly launches Tor service in the face of Russian censorship; Decentralized identity using blockchain.


“OK, I know NFT stands for nonfungible token. But what does it actually mean? Let’s start with the words themselves. In economics, “fungible” is a term used for things that can be exchanged for other things of exactly the same kind. The U.S. dollar is fungible, because you and a friend can trade $1 bills, and each of you will still have the exact same spending power. Most cryptocurrencies are fungible, too — a Bitcoin is a Bitcoin, and it doesn’t really matter which Bitcoin you have. But most objects in the physical world, such as cars and houses, are nonfungible — meaning they have unique qualities, and you can’t just exchange them for others of the same type. (You might be willing to swap your 2020 Honda Civic for another 2020 Honda Civic, but the cars wouldn’t be exactly the same, and you’d want to know what condition the other car was in before you’d agree to the trade.) Tokens, in crypto speak, are units of value stored on a blockchain. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ether and Dogecoin are tokens, but not all tokens are meant to be used as money. Tokens can be attached to tangible goods — Nike, for example, is experimenting with crypto tokens that are linked to the ownership of physical shoes — but they can also represent intangible goods, like access to a private chat room or storage space on a cloud server.

  • This is part of “The Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto,” a mega-F.A.Q. about cryptocurrency and its offshoots. Kevin Roose, a Times technology columnist, is answering some of the most frequently asked questions he gets about DAOs, DeFi, web3 and other crypto concepts.”


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