Web Excursions 2021-08-10
Someone started to re-read WSJ and FT in the 1920s; how “tortured” – badly translated — phrases in papers indicate plagiarism; E.U. has (yet another) idea on regulating online communications.
Roaring 20s by Tate - by Tate
Every Sunday, I will be covering weekly financial news from the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal print editions as it happened 100 years ago in the leadup to the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
Business & Financial News from 100 Years Ago
The Financial Times was 10-12 pages during the 1920s (today it stands around 45).
From its founding in 1888 to around 1930, the paper fluctuated between 4-12 pages.
The FT finally grew beyond 12 pages in the late 1950s.
By the mid-1970s, the FT began to resemble its modern incarnation.
The Wall Street Journal was founded about the same time as the FT, but expanded its page count much more quickly.
In the early 1920s, the page count totaled around 10.
This jumped to 20 by the end of the Roaring 20s.
The page count later stagnated in the 1930s and then began expanding in the early 1960s.
Like the FT, a typical paper in 1975 would resemble the current one today.
If it feels like financial markets have become more important in our daily lives, it’s because they are.
The page count growth reflects the importance of markets over the past century.
August 8-14, 1921
This week, the Dow languishes near multi-decade lows and blue-chip stocks trade below book value.
Even the Financial Times has temporarily shrunk: 6 pages per day this week down from the classic 12 pages. Summer has arrived.
‘Tortured phrases’ give away fabricated research papers
“Tortured phrases”: strange terms resulted from of automated translation or software that attempts to disguise plagiarism.
Big data - Colossal information
Artificial intelligence - Counterfeit consciousness
Deep neural network - Profound neural organization
Remaining energy - Leftover vitality
Cloud computing - Haze figuring
Signal to noise - Flag to commotion
Random value - Irregular esteem
the researchers ran a search for several tortured phrases in journal articles indexed in the citation database Dimensions.
They found more than 860 publications that included at least one of the phrases, 31 of which were published in a single journal: Microprocessors and Microsystems.
To dig deeper, the group downloaded all papers published in Microprocessors and Microsystems between 2018 and 2021,
a time frame they chose because an upgraded version of GPT was released in 2019.
They identified around 500 “questionable articles” based on various factors.
Their analysis revealed that papers published after February 2021 had an acceptance time that was five times shorter, on average, than those published before that date.
A high proportion of these papers came from authors in China.
Messaging and Chat Control – Patrick Breyer
The EU decided to let providers search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content – generally and indiscriminately.
In 2020 the European Commission proposed “temporary” legislation
aimed at allowing the search of all private chats, messages, and emails for illegal depictions of minors and attempted initiation of contacts with minors.
This is to allow the providers of Facebook Messenger, Gmail, et al, to scan every message for suspicious text and images.
This takes place in a fully automated process and using error-prone “artificial intelligence”.
If an algorithm considers a message suspicious,
its content and meta-data are disclosed automatically and without human verification to a private US-based organization and from there to national police authorities worldwide.
The reported users are not notified.
Some U.S. providers of services such as Gmail and Outlook.com are already performing such automated messaging and chat controls.
The stated aim: To prosecute child pornography.
The result [in the author's opinion]: Mass surveillance by means of fully automated real-time messaging and chat control and the end of secrecy of digital correspondence.
A majority of the Members of the European Parliament adopted the chatcontrol regulation on 6 July 2021.
For autumn 2021, European Commission announced that it will propose a follow-up legislation that will make the use of chatcontrol mandatory for all e-mail and messenger providers.
This legislation might then also affect securely end-to-end encrypted communications.
However, a public consultation by the Commission on this project showed that Over 80% of respondents oppose its application to end-to-end encrypted communications.
As a result, the Commission postponed the draft legislation originally announced for July to September 2021.
Messaging and chat control | Hacker News
anfelor: The scary thing about this is that many people have images that look like child porn at home: Family photos of naked grandchildren playing at the sea or in the mud, as well as sexting between consenting teenagers.
EDIT: Probably Apples neural hashes that are currently in the news won't be vulnerable to this since they trained specifically to only detect changes in color/cropping/rotation. But we can't know for sure since the white paper is not that detailed and "naked kid on beach" photos all look really similar usually.