"After nearly ten months of tracking Israeli soldiers abroad, the Hind Rajab Foundation and the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) have scored a symbolic breakthrough: the arrest and interrogation of two Israeli soldiers in Belgium on war crimes allegations related to the war in Gaza.
The soldiers were released after questioning. Belgian prosecutors, however, said a formal investigation was underway.
For observers of international justice, the incident signals a potential turning point — a shift from symbolic outrage to legal accountability for Israeli military actions in the Palestinian territories, raising diplomatic concerns in Israel.
“The era of impunity is coming to an end, and a new era of accountability is beginning,” said Dearbhla Minogue, a senior lawyer at GLAN involved in the case. “These unimaginable atrocities will be examined by courts around the world — and those responsible will be prosecuted and imprisoned to protect society.”
“It is the first time that law enforcement authorities in Europe have exercised universal jurisdiction against Israeli soldiers,” said Fiona Thorp, a legal fellow for International Crimes and Accountability at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin. “I hope this will motivate other European states to follow suit. These actions are essential in light of Israel’s unwillingness to hold its armed forces to account.”"
https://jacobin.com/2025/08/belgium-israeli-soldiers-arrest-gaza
#EU #Belgium #IDF #Israel #Palestine #WarCrimes #Genocide
"Facebook announced a 5% across-the-board layoff and doubled its executives' bonuses – on the same day. They fired thousands of workers and then hired a single AI researcher for $200m:
(...)
Whatever else all this is, it's a performance. It's a way of demonstrating the efficacy of the product they're hoping your boss will buy and replace you with: Remember when techies were prized beyond all measure, pampered and flattered? AI is SO GOOD at replacing workers that we are dragging these arrogant little shits out by their hoodies and firing them over Interstate 280 with a special, AI-powered trebuchet. Imagine how many of the ungrateful useless eaters who clog up your payroll *you will be able to vaporize when you buy our product!*
Which is why you should always dig closely into announcements about AI-driven tech layoffs. It's true that tech job listings are down 36% since ChatGPT's debut – but that's pretty much true of all job listings:"
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype
#AI #GenerativeAI #Automation #LLMs #Unemployment #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment
"The debate over whether or not Gaza is a genocide is, effectively, over. So can we now also stop pretending that we are mere bystanders to this genocide? That our sin is one only of omission rather than commission? Because the inconvenient truth is that the US has not just looked the other way, as tens of thousands of Palestinians have been besieged and bombed, starved and slaughtered, but helped Israel pull the trigger. We have been complicit in this genocide, which is itself a crime under article III of the Genocide convention.
As retired Israeli Maj Gen Yitzhak Brick acknowledged in November 2023: “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
In fact, given Brick’s assessment, I would argue that what we have witnessed in Gaza from the US government is worse than complicity. It is active participation in an ongoing genocide.
Donald Trump has given Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and his far-right government not only the green light to “clean out” Gaza and “finish the job”, but also the arms, intel and funds to do so."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/02/the-us-complicit-genocide-israel-gaza
#USA #Trump #Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Genocide #HumanRights
Welcome to the website for the Applied Cryptography course at the American University of Beirut! This page serves as a unified and self-sufficient source of truth on everything concerning your course.
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Course Description: Applied Cryptography explores the core theory of modern cryptography and how to apply these fundamental principles to build and analyze real-world secure systems. We start with foundational concepts—such as Kerckhoff's Principle, computational hardness, and provable security—before moving on to key cryptographic primitives like pseudorandom generators, block ciphers, and hash functions. Building on this solid groundwork, we will survey how these technologies power critical real-world deployments such as TLS, secure messaging protocols (e.g., Signal), and post-quantum cryptography. We will also delve into specialized topics like high-assurance cryptographic implementations, elliptic-curve-based systems, and zero-knowledge proofs to give you a complete understanding of contemporary cryptography's scope and impact. By the end of the semester, you will have gained both a rigorous theoretical perspective and practical hands-on experience, enabling you to evaluate, design, and implement cryptographic solutions."
https://appliedcryptography.page
#CyberSecurity #Encryption #Privacy #Cryptography #QuantumComputing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6kK7rIbyB0
Welcome to the website for the Applied Cryptography course at the American University of Beirut! This page serves as a unified and self-sufficient source of truth on everything concerning your course.
(...)
Course Description: Applied Cryptography explores the core theory of modern cryptography and how to apply these fundamental principles to build and analyze real-world secure systems. We start with foundational concepts—such as Kerckhoff's Principle, computational hardness, and provable security—before moving on to key cryptographic primitives like pseudorandom generators, block ciphers, and hash functions. Building on this solid groundwork, we will survey how these technologies power critical real-world deployments such as TLS, secure messaging protocols (e.g., Signal), and post-quantum cryptography. We will also delve into specialized topics like high-assurance cryptographic implementations, elliptic-curve-based systems, and zero-knowledge proofs to give you a complete understanding of contemporary cryptography's scope and impact. By the end of the semester, you will have gained both a rigorous theoretical perspective and practical hands-on experience, enabling you to evaluate, design, and implement cryptographic solutions."
https://appliedcryptography.page
#CyberSecurity #Encryption #Privacy #Cryptography #QuantumComputing
"Wikipedia editors just adopted a new policy to help them deal with the slew of AI-generated articles flooding the online encyclopedia. The new policy, which gives an administrator the authority to quickly delete an AI-generated article that meets a certain criteria, isn’t only important to Wikipedia, but also an important example for how to deal with the growing AI slop problem from a platform that has so far managed to withstand various forms of enshittification that have plagued the rest of the internet."
https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-editors-adopt-speedy-deletion-policy-for-ai-slop-articles/
#Wikipedia #AI #GenerativeAI #AISlop #ContentModeration
"As the hunger crisis in Gaza deepens, a growing chorus of EU staffers are contemplating strike action, contending that their institutions have failed to exert sufficient pressure on Israel to let vital humanitarian aid into the besieged region.
The proposal is still in its early stages, and key trade unions, whose support is essential, have so far hesitated to back the move, according to four civil servants involved.
Oreste Madia, a policy officer in the European Commission, has sent an open letter to President Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas, the bloc’s foreign policy chief, warning that Europe’s moral authority is at stake.
The letter – which Madia says has already garnered over 1,300 signatures from staffers across various institutions – calls for “bold and principled action now”, urging the EU to leverage its position as Israel’s largest trading partner to demand compliance with international humanitarian law.
Madia has set a target of 6,000 signatures, and warned that if EU leadership fails to respond, strikes may follow. “We are talking to lawyers to see if there are unions we can connect with and call a strike,” he said.
“We are fighting for the very soul of the EU,” Madia declared. “If I am complicit in a genocide, what am I doing here?”"
https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/eu-staff-could-strike-over-gaza/
#EU #EC #Brussels #Palestine #Gaza #Israel #Genocide #HumanRights
"A growing tide of fake papers is flooding the scientific record and proliferating faster than current checks can rid them from the system, scientists warn.
The source of the trouble is “paper mills,” businesses or individuals that charge fees to publish fake studies in legitimate journals under the names of desperate scientists whose careers depend on their publishing record.
The rate of fake papers generated by these operators roughly doubled every 1.5 years between 2016 and 2020, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The entire structure of science could collapse if this is left unaddressed,” said study author Luís Amaral, a physicist at Northwestern University.
Paper mills look for weak links, such as lax verification protocols, in the typically rigorous publication machinery, then exploit those to place hundreds of fabricated studies with vulnerable journals or publishers, according to scientist investigators who have been tracking and cataloging their work.
It can be a costly mess to clean up.
Publishers who have become aware of suspected paper mill activity have been forced to retract hundreds of papers at once, and in some cases shut down journals."
https://www.wsj.com/science/scientific-journals-fake-paper-mills-92e42230
#AI #GenerativeAI #AISlop #AcademicPublishing #PaperMills #ScientificJournals #Science #PeerReview
"Perplexity’s accusations aren’t exactly fair, either. One argument that Prince and Cloudflare used for calling out Perplexity’s methods was that OpenAI doesn’t behave in the same way.
“OpenAI is an example of a leading AI company that follows these best practices,” Cloudflare wrote. “They respect robots.txt and do not try to evade either a robots.txt directive or a network level block. And ChatGPT Agent is signing http requests using the newly proposed open standard Web Bot Auth.”
Web Bot Auth is a Cloudflare-supported standard being developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force that hopes to create a cryptographic method for identifying AI agent web requests.
The debate comes as bot activity reshapes the internet. As TechCrunch has previously reported, bots seeking to scrape massive amounts of content to train AI models have become a menace, especially to smaller sites.
For the first time in the internet’s history, bot activity is currently outstripping human activity online, with AI traffic accounting for over 50%, according to Imperva’s Bad Bot report released last month. Most of that activity is coming from LLMs. But the report also found that malicious bots now make up 37% of all internet traffic. That’s activity that includes everything from persistent scraping to unauthorized login attempts."
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/05/some-people-are-defending-perplexity-after-cloudflare-named-and-shamed-it/
#AI #GenerativeAI #AITraining #Perplexity #Cloudflare #AIAgents #WebCrawling #Chatbots #LLMs
Hi, everyone! I'm Miguel Caetano from Lisbon, Portugal.
In the past I was a technology journalist, a professional blogger, a communication researcher and a PhD grantee. But now I work as part technical writer, part front-end developer, part software tester.
More than 15 years ago, I wrote a master's dissertation on tactical media (and, by extension, Nettime). More recently I wrote a PhD thesis on how Portuguese and Brazilian Internet users interact with file sharing/P2P networks and services.
After that I enrolled on a 14-week long coding bootcamp. Nowadays, I work for a small Portuguese company called Cult of Bits.
Anyway, I'm very interested in engaging in thoughtful conversations about topics such as: copyright, file sharing, digital piracy and intellectual property, privacy and surveillance on social media platforms, cybersecurity, network neutrality, the social and ethical implications of the deployment of artificial intelligence, internet governance, cryptocurrencies and community wireless networks, etc.
I'm looking forward to see if this is the place :)
#Introduction #Mastodon
Miguel Afonso Caetano