Freedom

Fashionable Solutions to Thwart Invasive Surveillance

- Adam Clare

What you wear can impinge the ability of people to look at you. That’s been true for centuries, but today your fashion choices can actually make it harder for governments or private entities to track you throughout the day. The mass surveillance in our current society should concern you as it erodes our freedoms. One fashion designer has had enough of her liberties being attacked that the designed some flashy gear to obfuscate who you are. The clothing designed by Kate Rose confuses algorithms to think that you are something you are not, for example by wearing certain patterns a computer may think you are a car.

Use of patterning and adversarial input techniques are on the rise as computer vision analysis of everything from our faces to our license plates becomes ubiquitous for everything from marketing to state surveillance. This talk will be a highly tactical guide to give an overview of the work in the area of confounding or intentionally triggering computer vision systems with fashion. This presentation will show you the same open source guides, libraries, and resources to build your own adversarial clothing, via the process used to develop ALPR-triggering fabrics. This talk will review not only the technical and aesthetic considerations, but also getting over the manufacturing hurdle from design to prototype so you can quickly deploy your fashion hacks to the people

Read more.

How We can Track COVID-19 and NOT Invade Your Privacy

- Adam Clare

To figure out the spread of COIV-19, or other diseases, the technique of contact tracing gets used by researchers to decipher who is likely to have been exposed. When too many people are infected then contact tracing takes too much labour and subsequently becomes less useful, which has led tech companies and government to propose the ability to track you everywhere you go. You might think “what’s the big deal?”, the big deal is that this tracking will continue past the pandemic and it doesn’t need to happen in the first place. There are ways to build technical contact tracing without the government or an undemocratic mega-corporation spying or profiteering off of your personal location.

The wonderful Nicky Case put together a comic explaining how we can have technologically-driven contact tracing without spying on your everyday actions.

nick case covid tracking privacy

Read the comic.

Technical documents:
Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing
Temporary Contact Numbers, a decentralized, privacy-first contact tracing protocol
Quantifying SARS-CoV-2 transmission suggests epidemic control with digital contact tracing

Be Conscious of Wild Animal Pictures with Tourists

- Adam Clare

Elephants

It’s a sad truth that animals are caught in the wild and are then subsequently forced to entertain tourists against their will. Too often “influencers” and regular tourists take pictures alongside these animals to show how pleasant their travel experience has been, but this ignores the plight of the animals. This practice of exploiting animals needs to stop. Last year, National Geographic released a great expose on how animals are being treated in many tourist-friendly places (primarily in South East Asia) and how tourists themselves contribute to the animal abuse.

People have become aware of this horrible practice and are instead going to sanctuaries instead. Still, not every ethical place operates, errr ethically. At the very least they are an improvement to the current popular practices seen around the world. I took the picture above at the Elephant Conservation Centre in Laos.

What you can do to help stop animal abuse in the tourism industry:
-Stop liking pictures with animals in it
-Comment on the posts saying you hope the person went to an ethical place
-Donate to an animal sanctuary

Meena’s life is set to follow the same trajectory as many of the roughly 3,800 captive elephants in Thailand and thousands more throughout Southeast Asia. She’ll perform in shows until she’s about 10. After that, she’ll become a riding elephant. Tourists will sit on a bench strapped to her back, and she’ll give several rides a day. When Meena is too old or sick to give rides—maybe at 55, maybe at 75—she’ll die. If she’s lucky, she’ll get a few years of retirement. She’ll spend most of her life on a chain in a stall.

Read more.

One way you can help the solve problem right now:

Use TOR to Access the BBC on the “Dark Web”

- Adam Clare

computer screen

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has launched on the dark web to help those in authoritarian regimes access international news. To access the the site one only need the Tor browser and don’t need to use a VPN to get around national censorship firewalls. The TOR browser works anonymously by connecting to other TOR computers to generate a connection that cannot be traced to its source, so if you’re accessing a banned site from your country it’s nearly impossible to trace the connection back to your computer. As companies like Google track everything we do online we may all need to familiarize ourselves with privacy-focussed solutions. Check out the TOR browser and practice good digital protections.

The Tor browser is privacy-focused software used to access the dark web.
The browser can obscure who is using it and what data is being accessed, which can help people avoid government surveillance and censorship.

Countries including China, Iran and Vietnam are among those who have tried to block access to the BBC News website or programmes
Instead of visiting bbc.co.uk/news or bbc.com/news, users of the Tor browser can visit the new bbcnewsv2vjtpsuy.onion web address. Clicking this web address will not work in a regular web browser.

Read more.

User Molire at Reddit created the following list:

Tor Browser: https://www.torproject.org/
The BBC onion service is available in at least the following languages:
Arabic — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/arabic
Bengali (Bangladesh) — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/bengali
Chinese (simplified) — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/zhongwen/simp
English: https://www.bbcnewsv2vjtpsuy.onion/
French — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/afrique
Gujarati (India) — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/gujarati
Hindi (India) — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/hindi
Marathi (India) — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/marathi
Tamil (India) — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/tamil
Indonesian — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/indonesia
Japanese — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/japanese
Korean — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/korean
Portuguese — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/portuguese
Punjabi (Pakistan) — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/punjabi
Urdu (Pakistan) — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/urdu
Russian — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/russian
Spanish — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/mundo
Thai — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/thai
Turkish — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/turkce
Vietnamese — https://www.s5rhoqqosmcispfb.onion/vietnamese

Try These Ethical Alternatives to Popular Apps

- Adam Clare

computer screen

Large tech companies find ways to make money off of your data without you knowing about it, they might even be sharing personal information about you with governments or advertisers. If that makes you uncomfortable (I hope it does) then you should consider looking for alternatives to mainstream software services and applications. For example you can replace Google with Ecosia or DuckDuckGo.

Thankfully there’s a group that is dedicated to making our tech more ethical and encouraging people to find these ethical solutions in an easy way via one site: ethical.net.

You can join in the conversation about ethical technologies and uses at their forum.

Ethical.net is a collaborative platform for discovering and sharing ethical product alternatives — whether that means purchasing from a social enterprise, thrift shopping, or learning how to fix your old phone instead of buying a new one.

What do we mean by ethical?
We know that “ethical” can mean very different things to different people.
But for us, it’s broadly about pursuing sustainability instead of growth, and putting people above profit.

Check it out!

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