Technology

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/40035733

Around the world, discussions about digital sovereignty are intensifying. Governments, institutions, companies and civil society are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of controlling their own digital infrastructure. From concerns about data protection and vendor lock-in to questions of political autonomy, the topic has moved from niche circles to mainstream policy debates. In our new Digital Sovereignty Index, we show how countries compare in digital independence!

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Nextcloud developed the Digital Sovereignty Index (DSI): a simple metric to illustrate how much self hosted collaboration applications are actively used across nearly 60 countries. It represents the relative amount of deployments of self-hosted productivity & collaboration tools per 100,000 citizens, compared to other countries.

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Here is a more detailed description: https://nextcloud.com/blog/digital-sovereignty-index-how-countries-compare-in-digital-independence/

Meta has recently started using the personal data of Europeans for AI training. Contrary to its GDPR obligations, Meta hasn’t asked for consent in advance. Instead, the company claims to have a ‘legitimate interest’ outweighing the fundamental right to privacy. A key argument in favour of such a ‘legitimate interest’ is the reasonable expectations of users. This begs the question: do people want this to happen? To find out more, noyb has commissioned the Gallup Institute to conduct a study among 1,000 Meta users in Germany. The results are clear: While almost 75% of users heard of Meta’s plans, only 7% actually want their data to be used for AI training. This also means that at least 68 million people never heard about the change.

Library of Congress Statement:

• Hackernews.
• Reddit.

• The Government has secretly allowed police forces to search over 150 million UK passport and immigration database photos with “Orwellian” facial recognition technology for 6 years.
• The number of searches of the passport database has “skyrocketed” from 2 in 2020 to 417 in 2023. 16 searches of the immigration database were made in 2023, increasing almost sevenfold to 102 in 2024.
• Campaigners to institute legal action, claiming it is an “historic breach of the right to privacy”.
• Former minister Sir David Davis MP says “It’s outrageous that parliamentarians and the public have been kept in the dark about this extraordinary surveillance system”.

Hackernews.

Hackernews.

Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) sent a letter to the Intel Corporation’s Board of Directors Chairman Frank Yeary expressing concern over Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan’s investments and ties to semiconductor firms that are reportedly linked to the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army. Prior to his role at Intel Mr. Tan was CEO of Cadence Design Systems, which recently pleaded guilty to illegally selling export-controlled American technologies to entities connected to the Chinese military.

• Web.
• PDF.

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) including large language models (LLMs) and hybrid reasoning models present an opportunity to reimagine how autonomous robots such as drones are designed, developed, and validated. Here, we demonstrate a fully AI-generated drone control system: with minimal human input, an artificial intelligence (AI) model authored all the code for a real-time, self-hosted drone command and control platform, which was deployed and demonstrated on a real drone in flight as well as a simulated virtual drone in the cloud. The system enables real-time mapping, flight telemetry, autonomous mission planning and execution, and safety protocolsall orchestrated through a web interface hosted directly on the drone itself. Not a single line of code was written by a human. We quantitatively benchmark system performance, code complexity, and development speed against prior, human-coded architectures, finding that AI-generated code can deliver functionally complete command-and-control stacks at orders-of-magnitude faster development cycles, though with identifiable current limitations related to specific model context window and reasoning depth. Our analysis uncovers the practical boundaries of AI-driven robot control code generation at current model scales, as well as emergent strengths and failure modes in AI-generated robotics code. This work sets a precedent for the autonomous creation of robot control systems and, more broadly, suggests a new paradigm for robotics engineeringone in which future robots may be largely co-designed, developed, and verified by artificial intelligence. In this initial work, a robot built a robot's brain.

• Rise in accessible AI tools significantly lowered the barrier to entry for cyber attackers, enabling them to create and deploy malicious bots at scale
• For the first time in a decade, automated traffic surpassed human activity, accounting for 51% of all web traffic
• API-directed attacks surged to 44% of advanced bot traffic, with the travel sector topping the list for bot attacks overall