With 1.4 billion people, India is the second most-populous country in the world.

But a new article in the Washington Post alleges that India has "set a global standard for online censorship." For years, a committee of executives from U.S. technology companies and Indian officials convened every two weeks in a government office to negotiate what could — and could not — be said on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. At the "69A meetings," as the secretive gatherings were informally called, officials from India's information, technology, security and intelligence agencies presented social media posts they wanted removed, citing threats to India's sovereignty and national security, executives and officials who were present recalled. The tech representatives sometimes pushed back in the name of free speech...

But two years ago, these interactions took a fateful turn. Where officials had once asked for a handful of tweets to be removed at each meeting, they now insisted that entire accounts be taken down, and numbers were running in the hundreds. Executives who refused the government's demands could now be jailed, their companies expelled from the Indian market. New regulations had been adopted that year to hold tech employees in India criminally liable for failing to comply with takedown requests, a provision that executives referred to as a "hostage provision." After authorities dispatched anti-terrorism police to Twitter's New Delhi office, Twitter whisked its top India executive out of the country, fearing his arrest, former company employees recounted.

Indian officials say they have accomplished something long overdue: strengthening national laws to bring disobedient foreign companies to heel... Digital and human rights advocates warn that India has perfected the use of regulations to stifle online dissent and already inspired governments in countries as varied as Nigeria and Myanmar to craft similar legal frameworks, at times with near-identical language. India's success in taming internet companies has set off "regulatory contagion" across the world, according to Prateek Waghre, a policy director at India's Internet Freedom Foundation...

Despite the huge size of China's market, companies like Twitter and Facebook were forced to steer clear of the country because Beijing's rules would have required them to spy on users. That left India as the largest potential growth market. Silicon Valley companies were already committed to doing business in India before the government began to tighten its regulations, and today say they have little choice but to obey if they want to remain there.
The Post spoke to Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the deputy technology minister in the BJP government who oversees many of the new regulations, who argued "The shift was really simple: We've defined the laws, defined the rules, and we have said there is zero tolerance to any noncompliance with the Indian law...

"You don't like the law? Don't operate in India," Chandrasekhar added. "There is very little wiggle room."

Wednesday five of the U.S. Republican candidates for president gathered for their third debate in Miami — where they again urged the banning of TikTok in America:

Moderator: Last week congressman Mike Gallagher, who is chairman of the House bipartisan select committee on the Chinese Community party, published a long essay on TikTok... [H]e called the app "predatory... controlled by America's preeminent adversary," used to push propaganda and divide America. It's "spyware," he said — a means of surveillance.

Governor Christie, do you agree with chairman Gallgaher, and if so would you ban or force the sale of TikTok.

Chris Christie: I agree 100% with chairman Gallagher, and let me say this. TikTok is not only spyware. it is polluting the minds of American young people, all throughout this country. And they're doing it intentionally... This is China trying to further divide the United States of America...

In my first week as president, we would ban TikTok. They want to go ahead and sell it, let 'em go ahead and sell it. But I'll tell you another reason we would do it. Facebook's not in China. X is not in China. They're not permitting a free flow of information to the Chinese people from our social media companies. Yet we just open the door and let them do what they're doing. TikTok should be banned because they are poisoning American minds, and I would do it Week One... [Applause from audience.]

Ron DeSantis: [DeSantis began by saying he would also ban TikTok.] I think that China's the top threat we face. They've been very effective at infiltrating different parts of our society... And as the dad of a 6-, 5-, and a 3-year-old, I'm concerned about the data that they're getting from our young people, and what they're doing to pollute the minds of our young people... Their role in our culture? If we ignore that, we're not going to be able to win the fight...

Vivek Ramaswamy: In the last debate [Nikki Haley] made fun of me for joining TikTok? Well her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time, so you might want to take care of your family first... [Audience boos]

Nikki Haley: Leave my daughter out of your voice.

Vivek Ramaswamy: The next generation of Americans are using it, and that's actually the point... Here's the truth. The easy answer is actually to say that we're just going to ban one app. We gotta go further. We have to ban any U.S. company actually transferring U.S. data to the Chinese. Here's a story most people don't know. Airbnb hands over U.S. user data to the CCP. Now that's a U.S.-owned company... Even U.S. companies in Silicon Valley are regularly doing it...

Tim Scott: What we should do is ban TikTok, period... If you cannot ban TikTok, you should eliminate the Chinese presence on the app. Period.
In the previous debate Nikki Haley made her own position clear. "We can't have TikTok in our kids' lives. We need to ban it."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: One of the nation's largest private radiology companies agreed to pay a $450,000 fine after a 2021 ransomware attack led to the exposure of sensitive information from nearly 200,000 patients. In an agreement announced on Wednesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James said US Radiology failed to remediate a vulnerability announced by security company SonicWall in January 2021. US Radiology used the company's firewall to protect its network and provide managed services for many of its partner companies, including the Windsong Radiology Group, which has six facilities across Western New York.

The vulnerability highlighted by the attorney general -- CVE-2021-20016 -- was used by ransomware gangs in several attacks. US Radiology was unable to install the firmware patch for the zero-day because its SonicWall hardware was at an end-of-life stage and was no longer supported. The company planned to replace the hardware in July 2021, but the project was delayed "due to competing priorities and resource restraints." The vulnerability was never addressed, and the company was attacked by an unnamed ransomware gang on December 8, 2021.

An investigation determined that the hacker was able to gain access to files that included the names, dates of birth, patient IDs, dates of service, provider names, types of radiology exams, diagnoses and/or health insurance ID numbers of 198,260 patients. The data exposed during the incident also included driver's license numbers, passport numbers, and Social Security numbers for 82,478 New Yorkers. [...] In addition to the $450,000 penalty, the company will have to upgrade its IT network, hire someone to manage its data security program, encrypt all sensitive patient information and develop a penetration testing program. The company will have to delete patient data "when there is no reasonable business purpose to retain it" and submit compliance reports to the state for two years. "When patients visit a medical facility, they deserve confidence in knowing that their personal information will not be compromised when they are receiving care," said Attorney General James. "US Radiology failed to protect New Yorkers' data and was vulnerable to attack because of outdated equipment. In the face of increasing cyberattacks and more sophisticated scams to steal private data, I urge all companies to make necessary upgrades and security fixes to their computer hardware and systems."

An anonymous reader shares a report: A young man sits in a car, pointing a cellphone camera out of the window, seemingly trying to remain undetected. As he breathes heavily in anticipation, he peers at a T-Mobile store across the road from where he is parked.

Suddenly, there is some commotion inside. An accomplice grabs something off a table where a T-Mobile employee is sitting. The accomplice, dressed in a mask and black baseball cap, then bursts out of the store and clumsily sprints towards the car. The man in the vehicle starts laughing, then giggling uncontrollably like a child. The pair got what they came for: a T-Mobile employee's tablet, the sort workers use everyday when dealing with customer support issues or setting up a new phone.

To the people in the car, what this tablet is capable of is much more valuable than iPad hardware itself. The tablet lets them essentially become T-Mobile. It can grant them the ability to take over target phone numbers, and redirect any text messages or calls for the victim to the hacker's own device, as part of a hack called a SIM swap. From there, they can easily break into email, cryptocurrency, and social media accounts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The government of Maine has confirmed over a million state residents had personal information stolen in a data breach earlier this year by a Russia-linked ransomware gang. In a statement published Thursday, the Maine government said hackers exploited a vulnerability in its MOVEit file-transfer system, which stored sensitive data on state residents. The hackers used the vulnerability to access and download files belonging to certain state agencies between May 28 and May 29, the statement read. The Maine government said it was disclosing the incident and notifying affected residents as its assessment of the impacted files "was recently completed."

Maine said that the stolen information may include a person's name, date of birth, Social Security number, driver's license and other state or taxpayer identification numbers. Some individuals had medical and health insurance information taken. The statement said the state holds information about residents "for various reasons, such as residency, employment, or interaction with a state agency," and that the data it holds varies by person. According to the state's breakdown of which agencies are affected, more than half of the stolen data relates to Maine's Department of Health and Human Services, with up to about a third of the data affecting the Maine's Department of Education. The remaining data affects various other agencies, including Maine's Bureau of Motor Vehicles and Maine's Department of Corrections, though the government notes that the breakdown of information is subject to change. More than 1.3 million people live in the state of Maine, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Tumblr may be nearing its end after its management sent memos to staff with the Lord Tennyson quote about having "loved and lost." Ars Technica reports: Internet statesman and Waxy.org proprietor Andy Baio posted what is "apparently an internal Automattic memo making the rounds on Tumblr" to Threads. The memo, written to employees at WordPress.com parent company Automattic, which bought Tumblr from Verizon's media arm in 2019, is titled or subtitled "You win or you learn." The posted memo states that a majority of the 139 employees working on product and marketing at Tumblr (in a team apparently named "Bumblr") will "switch to other divisions." Those working in "Happiness" (Automattic's customer support and service division) and "T&S" (trust and safety) would remain.

"We are at the point where after 600+ person-years of effort put into Tumblr since the acquisition in 2019, we have not gotten the expected results from our effort, which was to have revenue and usage above its previous peaks," the posted memo reads. After quotes and anecdotes about love, loss, mountain climbing, and learning on the journey, the memo notes that nobody will be let go and that team members can make a ranked list of their top three preferred assignments elsewhere inside Automattic.

Omegle, a popular online chat service that allowed individuals to connect and chat with strangers, has shut down after 15 years citing growing misuse of the platform, including in committing "unspeakably heinous crimes." From a report: The site, founded in 2009 by a then 18-year-old programmer and high school student Leif K-Brooks, was bootstrapped throughout its existence. Though it waned in popularity over the years, it still pulled about 50 million visitors last month, according to analytics firm SimilarWeb.

Mark Tyson reports via Tom's Hardware: A commercial smartphone or Linux computer can be used to crack RSA-2048 encryption, according to a prominent research scientist. Dr Ed Gerck is preparing a research paper with the details but couldn't hold off from bragging about his incredible quantum computing achievement (if true) on his LinkedIn profile. Let us be clear: the claims seem spurious, but it should be recognized that the world isn't ready for an off-the-shelf system that can crack RSA-2048, as major firms, organizations, and governments haven't yet transitioned to encryption tech that is secured for the post-quantum era.

In his social media post, Gerck states that a humble device like a smartphone can crack the strongest RSA encryption keys in use today due to a mathematical technique that "has been hidden for about 2,500 years -- since Pythagoras." He went on to make clear that no cryogenics or special materials were used in the RSA-2048 key-cracking feat. BankInfoSecurity reached out to Gerck in search of some more detailed information about his claimed RSA-2048 breakthrough and in the hope of some evidence that what is claimed is possible and practical. Gerck shared an abstract of his upcoming paper. This appears to show that instead of using Shor's algorithm to crack the keys, a system based on quantum mechanics was used, and it can run on a smartphone or PC.

In some ways, it is good that the claimed breakthrough doesn't claim to use Shor's algorithm. Alan Woodward, a professor of computer science at the University of Surrey, told BankInfoSecurity that no quantum computer in existence has enough gates to implement Shor's algorithm and break RSA-2048. So at least this part of Gerck's explanation checks out. However, the abstract of Gerck's paper looks like it is "all theory proving various conjectures - and those proofs are definitely in question," according to Woodward. The BankInfoSecurity report on Gerck's "QC Algorithms: Faster Calculation of Prime Numbers" paper quotes other skeptics, most of whom are waiting for more information and proofs before they organize a standing ovation for Gerck.

Long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat writes: : A recent social media post by an Aussie received a deluge of replies and comments. His comment? "I'm so f***ing tired of 'tech' being used to solve an 'issue' but only making everything worse and more inconvenient for everybody," they wrote.

His comment was in response to going to a restaurant and having only a QR code to order from — literally a menu at the table with only the QR code on it. The app required to order from it "proceeded to charge a 6.5% venue surcharge, a 2% payment processing fee, and then had the audacity to ask for a tip (10%, 15%, 25%) as the cherry on top".
From Australia's News.com.au: Hundreds of others enthusiastically agreed and many added they also didn't like being asked to enter their personal details. "You're waiting your own table and paying an extra fee for the privilege. It's f***ed," one person responded. "It's also a big stinking FU to anyone old or not tech savvy. All just to hoover up your data," another added.

Some, however, shared they preferred using QR codes to order their food — they removed the need to move to order more and limited engagement with staff. "I actually like the QR ordering because I don't like people, but the surcharges and tipping can f*** off," one said. "I love the QR codes — don't need to leave the table to order another beer," someone else wrote...

Jonathan Holmes-Ross, owner of board game restaurant, The Lost Dice in Adelaide told news.com.au that the use of QR code ordering had let his eatery "reduce costs by around 25%... We no longer have to take orders, work out bills and manually take payments," he said. "This gives our wait staff more time to look after our customers, and the kitchen has excellent order information as the accuracy of the orders is great. We now have very few mistakes saving us time and waste. We can also mark items that have run out instantly on the app by using stock levels, again avoiding the disappointment of (the) customer."

The Washington Post looks at the "millions of independent creators reshaping how people get their news, especially the youngest viewers." News consumption hit a tipping point around the globe during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, with more people turning to social media platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and Instagram than to websites maintained by traditional news outlets, according to the latest Digital News Report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. One in 5 adults under 24 use TikTok as a source for news, the report said, up five percentage points from last year. According to Britain's Office of Communications, young adults in the United Kingdom now spend more time watching TikTok than broadcast television. This shift has been driven in part by a desire for "more accessible, informal, and entertaining news formats, often delivered by influencers rather than journalists," the Reuters Institute report says, adding that consumers are looking for news that "feels more relevant...."

While a few national publications such as the New York Times and The Washington Post have seen their digital audiences grow, allowing them to reach hundreds of thousands more readers than they did a decade ago, the economics of journalism have shifted. Well-known news outlets have seen a decline in the amount of traffic flowing to them from social media sites, and some of the money that advertisers previously might have spent with them is now flowing to creators. Even some outlets that began life on the internet have struggled, with BuzzFeed News shuttering in April, Vice entering into bankruptcy and Gawker shutting down for a second time in February. The trend is likely to continue. "There are no reasonable grounds for expecting that those born in the 2000s will suddenly come to prefer old-fashioned websites, let alone broadcast and print, simply because they grow older," Reuters Institute Director Rasmus Kleis Nielsen said in the report, which is based on an online survey of roughly 94,000 adults in 46 national markets, including the United States...

While many online news creators are, like Al-Khatahtbeh, trained journalists collecting new information, others are aggregators and partisan commentators sometimes masquerading as journalists. The transformation has made the public sphere much more "chaotic and contradictory," said Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at New York University and author of the PressThink blog, adding that it has never been easier to be both informed and misinformed about world events. "The internet makes possible much more content, and reaching all kinds of people," Rosen said. "But it also makes disinformation spread."
The article notes that "some content creators don't follow the same ethical guidelines that are guideposts in more traditional newsrooms, especially creators who seek to build audiences based on outrage."

The article also points out that "The ramifications for society are still coming into focus."

Ivan Mehta reports via TechCrunch: Instagram head Adam Mosseri said today that a Threads API is in the works. This will give developers a chance to create different apps and experiences around Threads. Mosseri was responding to journalist Casey Newton, who was conversing with a user about a TweetDeck-like experience for Threads. The Instagram head expressed apprehension about publishers posting a bunch of content and in turn, overshadowing creator content.

"We're working on it. My concern is that it'll mean a lot more publisher content and not much more creator content, but it still seems like something we need to get done," Mosseri said in a post. Later, an engineer working on Threads said that the team would start with endpoints for publishing content for the API. [...]

While Mosseri is concerned about publishers pushing an overwhelming amount of content through API integration, creators also need different tools to post various types of content. It also makes it easier for developers to design features suited for a specific platform if there is the option for an API integration.

LinkedIn, the business-focused social network owned by Microsoft, on Wednesday said it now has more than 1 billion members and is adding more AI features for paying users. From a report: Crossing the billion-users mark puts LinkedIn -- where members maintain a resume-like profile of their education, work experience and professional skills -- in the top-tier of social media networks that include rivals such as Meta Platforms. About 80% of recent members are signing up from outside of the United States, the company has said.

LinkedIn has a free tier of membership but also offers subscriptions. Members of its $39.99-a-month tier will get new AI features that can tell a user, who may be plowing through dozens of job postings, whether they're a good candidate based on the information in their profile. The system can also recommend profile changes to make the user more competitive for a job.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: They say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. But when it comes to tackling a tricky task, researchers have found that getting angry can also be a powerful motivator. The experiments suggest people who are angry perform better on a set of challenging tasks than those who are emotionally neutral. "These findings demonstrate that anger increases effort toward attaining a desired goal, frequently resulting in greater success," said Dr Heather Lench, the first author of the study.

The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (PDF), details how researchers at Texas A&M University conducted experiments involving more than 1,000 people, and analyzed survey data from more than 1,400 people, to explore the possible impact of anger on people in various circumstances. In one experiment, students were shown images previously found to elicit anger, desire, amusement, sadness or no particular emotion at all. Participants were subsequently asked to solve a series of anagrams. The results reveal that for a challenging set of anagrams, those who were angry did better than those in the other possible emotional states -- although no difference was seen for easy anagrams.

The researchers say one explanation could be down to a link between anger and greater persistence, with the team finding those who were angry spent more time on the difficult set of anagrams. In another experiment, participants who were angry did better at dodging flags in a skiing video game than those who were neutral or sad, and were on a par with those who felt amusement or desire. "This pattern could indicate that general physical arousal had a benefit for game scores, as this would be greater in anger, amused, and desire conditions compared to the sad and neutral conditions," the researchers write. However, no such differences in performance was found when it came to an easier video game.

China's popular social media platforms are requiring "self-media" accounts with over 500,000 followers to disclose real-name information, prompting concerns over increased doxxing and privacy among some users. Reuters reports: China's most popular social media platforms on Tuesday announced that "self-media" accounts with more than 500,000 followers will be asked to display real-name information, a controversial measure that has prompted concerns over doxxing and privacy among some users. "Self-media" includes news and information not necessarily approved by the government, a genre of online content regulators have cracked down on in recent years to "purify" China's cyberspace. [...]

Rumors of the new policy had prompted lively debate among users. Some, like former state media editor Hu Xijin, have defended the measure as necessary in order to force influential accounts to use more responsible speech. Others, however, have expressed concerns that the measure would make doxxing easier and platforms would further remove online users' anonymity in the future.

The new measures will remove the anonymity of thousands of influencers on social media platforms that are used daily by hundreds of millions of Chinese. Several of the platforms said that accounts with over 1 million followers would be affected first and those that do not comply would face restrictions in their online traffic and income as a consequence.

Pete Syme reports via Insider: A British software company is giving Meta 30 days to stop using the name Threads in the UK because it owns the trademark. Threads Software Limited says its lawyers wrote to the Facebook and Instagram parent company on Monday. If Meta doesn't stop using the name Threads, Threads Software Limited says it will seek an injunction from the courts.

The British company trademarked Threads in 2012 for its intelligent messaging hub, which can store a company's emails, tweets, and voice over internet protocol phone calls in a cloud database. In a press release, it said it had declined the four offers that Meta's lawyers made to purchase its domain name "threads.app." Then when Meta launched Threads, its social media app designed to compete with Elon Musk's X, the British company says it was removed from Facebook. John Yardley, the managing director of Threads Software Limited, said the business "faces a serious threat from one of the largest technology companies in the world."

"We recognize that this is a classic 'David and Goliath' battle with Meta," said Yardley. "And whilst they may think they can use whatever name they want, that does not give them the right to use the Threads brand name."

The creator economy is probably bigger than you think. The Washington Post reports it's "now a global industry valued at $250 billion, with tens of millions of workers, hundreds of millions of customers and its own trade association and work-credentialing programs." Millions have ditched traditional career paths to work as online creators and content-makers, using their computers and phones to amass followers and build businesses whose influence now rivals the biggest names in entertainment, news and politics... In the United States, the video giant YouTube estimated that roughly 390,000 full-time jobs last year were supported by its creators' work — four times the number of people employed by General Motors, America's biggest automaker...

This spring, analysts at Goldman Sachs said that 50 million people now work as creators around the world. The analysts expect the industry's "total addressable market," an estimate of consumer demand, will jump from $250 billion this year to $480 billion by 2027. For comparison, the global revenue from video games, now at about $227 billion, is expected to climb to roughly $312 billion by 2027, analysts at the financial giant PwC estimated in June. YouTube's report estimated that its creators contributed $35 billion to [U.S.] gross domestic product last year, a figure that would rank the group's combined output ahead of U.S. furniture manufacturing but behind rail transportation, according to industry data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis....

Payments from advertisers to creators in the United States have more than doubled since 2019, to $5 billion, estimates from the market research firm Insider Intelligence show... Megan Pollock, a branding executive at Panasonic North America, said that the company now devotes about 10 percent of its marketing budget to creators and that she expects further increases amid a long-term shift away from traditional ad campaigns.
Other interesting details from the article:

• Last month people watched 53 million hours of video a day just on Twitch. But 74% of that went to the top 10,000 streamers (according to data from the analytics firm StreamElements).

• "Creators' incomes are determined by giant tech and advertising companies that can change the rules in an instant, and a single mistake can unravel their careers."

• When America's youth are asked what they want to be when they grow up, "Influencer" is now one of the most popular answers — ranking higher than "astronaut" and "professional athlete"

According to Bloomberg the U.S. Labor Department's "OSHA" regulatory agency has "cited Amazon for exposing workers to ergonomic risks at several facilities." But how widespread is the problem?

29% of America's warehouse workers are working for Amazon, a team of researchers estimates. And "More than two-thirds of Amazon warehouse workers surveyed by researchers reported that they took unpaid time off to recover from pain or exhaustion sustained on the job." The new national study, published Wednesday by the University of Illinois Chicago's Center for Urban Economic Development, found that 69% of workers surveyed stayed home without pay to recover, including 34% who did so three or more times. The data suggests "injury and pain at Amazon are far more widespread" than previously known, said Beth Gutelius, research director at the center and a leading expert on logistics and warehouse work.

The report is based on a 98-question online survey that gathered responses from 1,484 warehouse workers in 451 facilities across 42 states, the researchers said. It was conducted between April and August and measured the percentage of workers who took time off during the previous month. Amazon employs hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers in the U.S.

Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel said the report was "not a 'study' — it's a survey done on social media, by groups with an ulterior motive." She recommended that people read the safety data Amazon submits each year to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, "which shows that rates in our buildings have improved significantly, and we're slightly above the average in some areas and slightly below the average in others."
41% of the workers surveyed reported being injured while working at an Amazon warehouse, according to the article. And "the share rises to 51% for people who have worked at the company for more than three years."

"For the last two decades, our social networking and social media platforms have been universes unto themselves," writes the Verge's editor-at-large: Each has its own social graph, charting who you follow and who follows you. Each has its own feed, its own algorithms, its own apps, and its own user interfaces (though they've all pretty much landed on the same aesthetics over time). Each also has its own publishing tools, its own character limits, its own image filters. Being online means constantly flitting between these places and their ever-shifting sets of rules and norms. Now, though, we may be at the beginning of a new era. Instead of a half-dozen platforms competing to own your entire life, apps like Mastodon, Bluesky, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and others are building a more interconnected social ecosystem.

If this ActivityPub-fueled change takes off, it will break every social network into a thousand pieces. All posts, of all types, will be separated from their platforms. We'll get new tools for creating those posts, new tools for reading them, new tools for organizing them, and new tools for moderating them and sharing them and remixing them and everything else besides.
He's talking about a decades-old concept called POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. ("Sometimes the P is also 'Post,' and the E can be 'Elsewhere.' The idea is the same either way." The idea is that you, the poster, should post on a website that you own. Not an app that can go away and take all your posts with it, not a platform with ever-shifting rules and algorithms. Your website. But people who want to read or watch or listen to or look at your posts can do that almost anywhere because your content is syndicated to all those platforms... [Y]our blog becomes the hub for everything, your main home on the internet.
The article argues that for now, "the best we have are tools like Micro.blog, a six-year-old platform for cross-posters." But the article ultimately envisions a future with not just new posting tools, but also new reading tools "with different ideas about how to display and organize posts."

Scharon Harding reports via Ars Technica: On Thursday, Leica Camera released the first camera that can take pictures with automatically encrypted metadata and provide features such as an editing history. The company believes this system, called Content Credentials, will help photojournalists protect their work and prove authenticity in a world riddled with AI-manipulated content.

Leica's M11-P can store each captured image with Content Credentials, which is based on the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity's (C2PA's) open standard and is being pushed by the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI). Content Credentials, announced in October, includes encrypted metadata detailing where and when the photo was taken and with what camera and model. It also keeps track of edits and tools used for edits. When a photographer opts to use the feature, they'll see a Content Credentials logo in the camera's display, and images will be signed through the use of an algorithm.

The feature requires the camera to use a specialized chipset for storing digital certificates. Credentials can be verified via Leica's FOTOS app or on the Content Credentials website. Leica's announcement said: "Whenever someone subsequently edits that photo, the changes are recorded to an updated manifest, rebundled with the image, and updated in the Content Credentials database whenever it is reshared on social media. Users who find these images online can click on the CR icon in the [pictures'] corner to pull up all of this historical manifest information as well, providing a clear chain of providence, presumably, all the way back to the original photographer." The M11-P's Content Credentials is an opt-in feature and can also be erased. As Ars has previously noted, an image edited with tools that don't support Content Credentials can also result in a gap in the image's provenance data.

The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has announced the creation of a 39-member advisory body to address issues in the international governance of artificial intelligence. From a report: Members include tech company executives, government officials from Spain to Saudi Arabia, and academics from countries such as the U.S., Russia and Japan. Sony Chief Technology Officer Hiroaki Kitano, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and Microsoft Chief Responsible AI Officer Natasha Crampton are among the executives representing technology companies.

Representatives also come from six continents with diverse backgrounds ranging from U.S.-based AI expert Vilas Dhar to Professor Yi Zeng fom China and Egyptian lawyer Mohamed Farahat. "The transformative potential of AI for good is difficult even to grasp," Guterres said in a statement. "And without entering into a host of doomsday scenarios, it is already clear that the malicious use of AI could undermine trust in institutions, weaken social cohesion and threaten democracy itself," he said.