Taste of Ireland - 🇮🇪 - The Time is Always Now

De Vine Taste of Italy

A Taste of Ireland: The Irish Music & Dance Sensation will have you laughing, crying and jigging into the night with a show that has entertained thousands. An all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza, this energetic, feel-good Irish music and dance feast will feature a company of over 15 with some of the world's leading Irish Dancers and musicians, including world champions and stars of other well-known shows, such as Riverdance and Lord of the Dance.

The sell-out Irish dance sensation A Taste of Ireland explodes back onto Newcastle stages this month with a spectacular new production.

Hot off sold-out tours across the UK, USA, Australia and New Zealand in 2023, this new production is touring NSW

A Taste of Ireland – The Irish Music & Dance Sensation

The Time is Always Now

10 PRINT “The BASIC programming language turns 60.“

Blood test finds knee osteoarthritis up to eight years before it appears on X-rays

 DeadLoch - Drama 🎭 Tasmania

What is World Freedom Day? World Freedom Day is an annual event that honors the historic events of November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall, which separated East and West Berlin, was breached and ultimately led to its demolition.

This led to this:

The United Nations General Assemblydeclared May 3 to be World Press Freedom Day or just World Press Day, observed to raise awareness of the importance of freedom of the press and remind governments of their duty to respect and uphold the right to freedom of expression enshrined under Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and marking the anniversary of the Windhoek Declaration, a statement of free press principles put together by Africannewspaper journalists in Windhoek in 1991.

World_Press_Freedom_Day

New York Times - Your Face Belongs To Us: A Tale of AI, a Secretive Startup, and The End of Privacy. – “Kashmir Hill is a technology reporter who has been covering the privacy implications of connected cars, including her own. Automakers have been selling data about the driving behavior of millions of people to the insurance industry. In the case of General Motors, affected drivers weren’t informed, and the tracking led insurance companies to charge some of them more for premiums.

I’m the reporter who broke the story. I recently discovered that I’m among the drivers who was spied on. My husband and I bought a G.M.-manufactured 2023 Chevrolet Bolt in December. This month, my husband received his “consumer disclosure files” from LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Verisk, two data brokers that work with the insurance industry and that G.M. had been providing with data. (He requested the files after my article came out in March, heeding the advice I had given to readers.) My husband’s LexisNexis report had a breakdown of the 203 trips we had taken in the car since January, including the distance, the start and end times, and how often we hard-braked or accelerated rapidly. The Verisk report, which dated back to mid-December and recounted 297 trips, had a high-level summary at the top: 1,890.89 miles driven; 4,251 driving minutes; 170 hard-brake events; 24 rapid accelerations, and, on a positive note, zero speeding events. 

I had requested my own LexisNexis file while reporting, but it didn’t have driving data on it. Though both of our names are on the car’s title, the data from our Bolt accrued to my husband alone because the G.M. dealership listed him as the primary owner. G.M.’s spokeswoman had told me that this data collection happened only to people who turned on OnStar, its connected services plan, and enrolled in Smart Driver, a gamified program that offers feedback and digital badges for good driving, either at the time of purchase or via their vehicle’s mobile app. 

That wasn’t us — and I had checked to be sure. In mid-January, again while reporting, I had connected our car to the MyChevrolet app to see if we were enrolled in Smart Driver. The app said we weren’t, and thus we had no access to any information about how we drove.”

 

Atlantic [unpaywalled] – A great public resource is at risk of being destroyed. By Judith Donath and Bruce Schneier: “The web has become so interwoven with everyday life that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment and treasure it is. In just a few decades, much of human knowledge has been collectively written up and made available to anyone with an internet connection. But all of this is coming to an end. The advent of AI threatens to destroy the complex online ecosystem that allows writers, artists, and other creators to reach human audiences. 

To understand why, you must understand publishing. Its core task is to connect writers to an audience. Publishers work as gatekeepers, filtering candidates and then amplifying the chosen ones. Hoping to be selected, writers shape their work in various ways. This article might be written very differently in an academic publication, for example, and publishing it here entailed pitching an editor, revising multiple drafts for style and focus, and so on…The arrival of generative-AI tools has introduced a voracious new consumer of writing. Large language models, or LLMs, are trained on massive troves of material—nearly the entire internet in some cases. 

They digest these data into an immeasurably complex network of probabilities, which enables them to synthesize seemingly new and intelligently created material; to write code, summarize documents, and answer direct questions in ways that can appear human. These LLMs have begun to disrupt the traditional relationship between writer and reader. Type how to fix broken headlight into a search engine, and it returns a list of links to websites and videos that explain the process. Ask an LLM the same thing and it will just tell you how to do it. Some consumers may see this as an improvement: 

Why wade through the process of following multiple links to find the answer you seek, when an LLM will neatly summarize the various relevant answers to your query? Tech companies have proposed that these conversational, personalized answers are the future of information-seeking. But this supposed convenience will ultimately come at a huge cost for all of us web users…”

New York Times

Encounters with the Westminster honeytrapper It took her three minutes to say she was blocking me — but the story didn’t end there

 Back in 2020, my friend — let’s call him Liam — messaged the group chat. “It’s relentless,” he said, with a screenshot of a message from a woman reading “Still single?”

Liam wasn’t complaining about the exhaustion of being desired. This was the same person he’d screenshotted into our chat the week before, when she was using the line “How’s lockdown treating you?” — pretty tame small talk, given she’d begun their correspondence with an unsolicited nude.

My mate — who is a Labour staffer — was featured in reports earlier this month about the Westminster honeytrapper, where it was revealed that UK politicians and parliamentary staffers had been targeted in a phishing attack. The WhatsApper, who went by the name Charlie or Abi, pretended to know the person, and the exchanges would become sexual. The reports mainly focused on attempts between October 2023 and February this year, but the story has longer roots. I should know, given I messaged “Abi” while she was still going by “Abbie” in 2020.

I’ll say that this wasn’t an entirely unusual situation for Liam. The same group chat has attempted to decode a voicemail he received in which two women laughed down the phone while attempting to spit the odd word out. But there was something about these particular messages that clearly made them fake. “Just don’t get what the end game is,” Liam grumbled, and it was true, it did seem weird. The WhatsApper didn’t want money, they weren’t trying to draw out his details, they just wanted to flirt.

Although we agreed it could be a unique experience to date a bot, he proceeded to ignore her. But it seemed worth testing, given the inexplicability of it all. Which is why I added the honeytrapper’s number to my contacts. “What’s the worst that could happen?” I asked. (The answer to that question is: four years later, screenshots of my WhatsApps being sent to the police.)

The tone was human, the back-story legitimate, the facts right. She sounded sweet, shy, interested

I decided to blunder in with a case of mistaken identity. If Abbie was real, there would be some kind of human response — even if it was simply, “Sorry babe, wrong number.”

Hey, I typed, without the foresight that I might one day be reiterating my messages in a newspaper column.

Who’s this, Abbie replied one minute later.

Your sis, dumbass, I responded. (I plead in my defence that I was attempting to establish a familiar tone.)

What? She was having none of it. No you aren’t, she wrote. Who is this.

It took her three minutes to say she was blocking me, six for our back-and-forth to be over. I relayed my interaction to the chat. The speed with which she distrusted and blocked me seemed to indicate the defensiveness of someone whose phone was only for initiating exchanges.

But the story didn’t end there. Last year, she appeared back on Liam’s phone. It was a different number and her name was now spelt “Abi”. She knew the campaign trail that he had been on the day before — which he hadn’t shared publicly — cited old work of his, and used his name again. “Long time no speak,” she messaged. “Liam right?” 

When he replied, unsure of her identity, she explained how they met, before demurring: “I’ll be offended but not surprised if you don’t remember me.”

The tone was human, the back-story legitimate, the facts right. She sounded sweet, shy, interested. We discussed it but my mate was adamant — it didn’t match any encounter. He stopped replying. But what if it hadsounded familiar? Or if he had allowed himself to believe it did . . . 

It’s easy to consider scams from a position of knowledge and wonder how anyone could fall for them. But isn’t communication fuelled by imagination? We read in tones, intentions, subtexts; when virtual, we also summon the sender’s voice or facial expressions. So much is conjured. It reminds me of a successful scam from last year: a text from an unknown number arrives — “Hi Mum” — before the sender explains that their phone is lost or broken and they need money. In the first half of 2023, victims lost more than £460,000. The scam tapped into an instinct: my child needs help, I must act quickly. Later, the victim might reflect and think: shouldn’t I have double-checked it was them? But these scams rely on instinctual responses, on the victim acting upon a fear or a want.

I’m glad my friend wasn’t fooled by the honeytrapper, that those messages were only group-chat fodder. For him, it’s merely a funny story. Back in 2020, his intuition kicked in — “Must be some guy on a laptop somewhere,” he speculated. But as to what that person wanted? Well, that’s the mystery we’re still unpicking in the group chat.

Rebecca Watson is the FT’s assistant arts and books editor. Her second novel ‘I Will Crash’ will be published by Faber in